INSIGHT on the News Online
insightmag.com
Vol. 15, No. 41 -- November 8, 1999
Published Date October 15, 1999, in Washington, D.C.
Red-Handed Lies
By J. Michael Waller
insightmag.com
From the beginning, the Clinton administration
was well aware of the Russian government's
involvement with organized crime but punished
those who dared point it out.
We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us," went
the old Soviet joke. Now it's "You pretend to reform
and we pretend to believe you," says former senator Bill
Bradley, a longtime critic of the Clinton administration's Russia
policy and Democratic presidential challenger to Vice President
Al Gore. "A more honest U.S. policy is essential."
. . . . With Bradley calling for more honesty -- a code phrase
for fewer lies --the press also has begun to snipe at White
House policy toward Russia. "Determinedly blind," said the
National Journal. "Na‹ve," asserted the Washington Post.
"Misguided," according to the Wall Street Journal. "A
charade," declared the New York Times.
. . . . The Bank of New York money-laundering scandal is
snowballing. More revelations by newly retired officials,
criminal investigations from Moscow to Switzerland to London
to Manhattan, a set of congressional hearings and a revisiting of
old press reports show an emerging pattern: From its first days
in office more than six years ago, the Clinton administration
systematically tried to suppress the truth about the sorry
progress of reform in Russia.
. . . . California Republican Rep. Tom Campbell, a longtime
and earnest defender of the Clinton administration's Russia
policy, sat bug-eyed at an Oct. 6 House International Relations
Committee hearing on how the administration ignored warnings
and dissent. He was one of the few members who listened to
all the expert testimony. But not everyone on Capitol Hill is
surprised.
. . . . "It's a pattern I've witnessed since Clinton took over,"
says Rep. Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania Republican who
chairs the House Armed Services subcommittee on Military
Research and Development, to which government
whistle-blowers have gone with their stories. As distinct from
the phlegmatic GOP leadership, Weldon has been on this issue
for years while other Republican chiefs were brushing off such
concerns and giving Clinton, Gore and the architect of
U.S.-Russia policy, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott,
the benefit of the doubt.
. . . . Weldon and some of his colleagues have found a pattern
-- not only in economics, corruption and organized crime, as
recent public events have emphasized, but across the board:
human rights, weapons proliferation, strategic-weapons
modernization, arms control and agriculture. The pattern shows
that the administration ignored intelligence reports, disregarded
cables from diplomats in the field, pressured diplomats and
intelligence analysts into not reporting developments that
conflicted with government policy, destroyed the careers of
public servants who bucked political pressure by doing their
job and misled Congress and the public.
. . . . Top Clinton officials knew the scope of government
corruption in Russia from their earliest days in office. Clinton's
first CIA director, R. James Woolsey, recently told the House
Banking and Financial Services Committee that in 1993 "some
very able CIA analysts came to me with an excellent briefing
on some aspects of Russian organized crime. I moved
promptly to ensure that very senior officials at the Justice
Department, the FBI, the National Security Council and other
relevant agencies received this briefing. In several of these
cases -- I remember briefings at Justice and the NSC -- I
personally attended in order to highlight the importance of the
subject and to emphasize the excellence and the creativity of
the CIA officers' work. I then commissioned a special National
Intelligence Estimate on Russian Organized Crime."
. . . . Woolsey added that he "put this issue on the agenda at
some of the intelligence community's most sensitive meetings on
intelligence matters with some of our closest allies and ensured
that at a very senior level they were appropriately briefed as
well." Through these efforts, he told lawmakers, "the U.S.
intelligence community and the CIA in particular performed a
valuable service in putting this issue squarely before those in the
U.S. government and in allied governments who needed to
know about it in order to take appropriate action."
. . . . But no action came. "If one steps back [from U.S. policy
toward Russian President Yeltsin] and looks at the overall
pattern, it is easy to see how ordinary Russians, who saw us in
highly idealized terms just a few years ago, have turned so sour
on the U.S.," said Woolsey. "In their eyes, we are the
supporters of those who have stolen much of their national
patrimony through a highly corrupted privatization process and
we are, at the same time, those who insist that the ordinary
people of Russia bend their backs even harder."
. . . . Woolsey insists he encountered no resistance to reports
dealing with Russian money laundering. But the CIA's former
top intelligence officer on Russia, Fritz Ermarth, argues that
"policymakers did resist this information and also resisted
explaining why they did so." According to Ermarth, "Their
disdain for analysis about corruption of Russian politics and
their Russian partners did, indeed, have a chilling effect on
treatment of these topics, especially during the critical years
1993-96."
. . . . Two former senior diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in
Moscow corroborate that view. E. Wayne Merry, who
directed the political section from 1991 to 1994, and his
successor, Thomas Graham, who served from 1994 to 1997,
have told Insight, as well as repeated in testimony before
Congress, that the embassy felt constant pressure starting in
1993 not to report developments that would indicate that the
Clinton administration's Russian partners were corrupt or that
Washington's policies were anything short of successful.
. . . . "Even if the embassy and CIA had not written a word,"
Merry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "the
Western press covered the story fairly well, while the Russian
media reported on corruption constantly; indeed, a series of
reporters were killed for their efforts. Anyone who wanted to
know, knew. The real questions are, 'Did our policymakers
care and what did they do about it?'"
. . . . Talbott had his chance to answer the next day.
Committee Chairman Jesse Helms of North Carolina asked
questions concerning whether Talbott knew about intelligence
reporting on corruption, but Talbott refused to answer. Helms
dismissed him, barely concealing his disgust.
. . . . In an Oct. 6-7 hearing on U.S. policy toward Russia at
which this writer testified as an expert witness, House
International Relations Committee Chairman Benjamin Gilman
of New York devoted the first day to assess the Clinton
administration's "treatment of criticisms, dissent or warnings."
The first witness, David Swartz, who was the first U.S.
ambassador to the former Soviet republic of Belarus, testified
that he warned of dangers in Clinton's new Russia-centered
approach to the region. "I repeatedly warned in cables and
policy analyses from Minsk of the dangers of a Russocentrist
approach," he said. "It was my view then and continues to be
that fundamental U.S. interests lie in a permanent fragmentation
of the former Soviet empire. I was ignored by Talbott."
. . . . After a 26-year career as a foreign-service officer,
Swartz resigned in protest in 1994. Today, Belarus is a
dictatorship on the path to being reabsorbed by Russia.
. . . . Former senior CIA officer Ermarth testified that the
administration's unwelcome attitude toward reports on Russian
corruption "discouraged" objective diplomatic and intelligence
reporting: "This silence protected our policy, especially
International Monetary Fund lending."
. . . . The administration also protected its policy by shutting
down intelligence activity that produced information that
undermined its line, even on the most sensitive areas of
U.S.-Russian relations and national security. Weldon probed
the matter four years ago.
. . . . "Russian Fission" was the name of a secret Energy
Department intelligence program that monitored Russian civilian
control of nuclear weapons and fissile material. John B. "Jay"
Stewart, a highly decorated military-intelligence officer who
directed an intelligence analysis of this program (see sidebar) in
1992, came to the conclusion that the Russian government was
losing control over its nuclear arsenal. He briefed top Bush
administration officials, as well as NATO Secretary-General
Manfred Woerner. "Woerner was so impressed that he sent a
cable to Washington, saying this was serious and he wanted all
NATO countries briefed on this issue by Jay Stewart," Weldon
tells Insight. "Woerner put together an entire
intelligence-community workshop for two days in late 1992.
Soon, when Clinton came into office, [Energy Secretary] Hazel
O'Leary came in. Stewart briefed her personally. Initially, she
was still very interested until she realized that exposing security
problems was not in sync with administration policy," Weldon
says. Soon, according to the congressman, Stewart no longer
was allowed to do the briefings, and officials ordered a clerical
worker to destroy Russian Fission documents and tapes in
Stewart's file.
. . . . A DOE political appointee warned Stewart not to discuss
the Russian Fission program and, within a month, this
intelligence effort was disbanded. "The entire program was set
aside. Jay's career was ended. With his distinguished service,
he nonetheless was shunted into a corner," says Weldon. "That
was the end of the program. Jay, because of simply speaking
out, was basically shoved aside." Stewart retired from
government in 1994. He would not comment for this article.
. . . . The chief of the CIA's nonproliferation center, Gordon
Oehler, met a similar professional fate. His briefings on how
Russia helped Iran build its Shahab-3 intercontinental ballistic
missile meant the end of his career. Oehler won't talk about his
sudden 1997 retirement but, when it happened, Joseph
Cirincione of the liberal Henry Stimson Center told the New
York Times, "Here's a man operating within the rules, sharing
information with Congress and policy experts. And some of the
news is uncomfortable and came at a delicate time. But he
never pulled his punches because the news was uncomfortable,
and apparently this administration didn't like it. I don't know
how else to read it."
. . . . Former Bush Pentagon official Henry Sokolski of the
Nonproliferation Policy Education Center agrees: "The
significance of his retirement is great. This man, in an agency
known for its bending of truths, was an honest broker. To find
integrity in public service is a rare, cherished and precious
thing. And when it goes, it brings down morale -- it's got to.
Whether his retirement was forced or not I don't know ... but
... that a man of integrity should feel such stress in being shot at
for his honesty is an indictment of what we claim to be doing in
the name of nonproliferation."
. . . . Another case Weldon cites is that of Lt. Jack Daly, the
U.S. Navy intelligence officer struck in the eyes by a laser from
a Russian spy ship in U.S. waters in April 1997. "Daly was
lased in the eye and fell victim to a cover-up led by
Ambassador James Collins to make sure the Russians didn't
get blamed," according to Weldon. Daly was denied promotion
and risked being forced out of the Navy. In congressional
testimony and interviews with Insight, Daly describes how
Collins, Talbott and other senior administration officials
conspired after the laser incident to cover up the affair for fear
of embarrassing Moscow. Insight has obtained a recent Navy
inspector general report that found Daly indeed had fallen
victim to "reprisal" for exposing the lasing incident.
. . . . "This is the pattern within the Clinton administration. I
have 12 to 14 whistle-blowers, people who have been abused
because they've been doing their job," says Weldon. "It is a
pervasive attitude that this administration hasn't wanted
anything to surface that they think might come in the way of
their predetermined policy conclusion. That means they deny
reality. They deny reality when Jay Stewart was doing the
Russian Fission program. They deny reality when Jack Daly
got lased. They deny reality when they issued NIE 95-19 [the
National Intelligence Estimate that downplayed the missile
threat to the United States and led to Congress creating a
special investigative commission led by former Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld]. They deny reality when Gordon
Oehler briefs officials about the Shahab missile and they force
him out of his position. They deny reality when they document
17 Russian arms-control violations."
. . . . Others within the system have been silenced -- or would
have been had it not been for persistent Pennsylvania
congressman Weldon. Dale Darling, an analyst at the
Lawrence Livermore nuclear-weapons lab, followed
cutting-edge Russian military technologies in a program called
"Silver Bullets." The program monitored how Moscow, despite
a cutback in its military, was developing exotic next-generation
weapons. Weldon, as chairman of the House Armed Services
subcommittee on Military Research and Development, called
Darling to ask for a briefing in July 1996. But Weldon didn't
hear anything from him until, the following month, he received
an anonymous letter that said, "I hope you will pursue the
briefing with Dale Darling. Dale has been pressured to cancel
the briefing."
. . . . Weldon succeeded in getting this briefing only by publicly
embarrassing then-defense secretary William Perry into a
commitment during a congressional hearing.
. . . . Some lawmakers believe that the administration
deliberately set out to mislead Congress about Russia policy
from the beginning so as not to undermine the White House's
blind support for Yeltsin. When House Banking and Financial
Services Committee Chairman Jim Leach of Iowa called
September hearings on Russian money laundering, lawmakers
learned that they never had been informed about a major
intelligence loss inflicted by CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames.
Defense consultant Karon von Gerhke-Thompson testified
how she had been an "unpaid volunteer intelligence asset on a
CIA operation to penetrate what the CIA, FBI and DOJ
[Department of Justice] knew was a KGB money-laundering
operation that had tentacles that reached into the Kremlin to
President Boris Yeltsin." After her Russian contacts cut her off,
von Gerhke-Thompson learned that "I had been compromised
by Aldrich Ames on the operation." She told lawmakers, "The
[money-laundering] operation was not reported to appropriate
congressional oversight committees as a significant failed
intelligence operation" as mandated by law, even though it "was
ranked among the CIA's highest priorities." A former CIA
general counsel affirmed that of all those compromised by
Ames, von Gerhke-Thompson's "was the only one that was not
reported." Said the former CIA asset, "It seemed to me that it
was a 'policy' versus 'intelligence' failure. [The]
money-laundering trail led directly to Boris Yeltsin."
. . . . Republicans aren't alone in their leeriness about such
administration policy. The most senior-ranking woman in the
House, Ohio Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, long has
doubted the executive branch's commitment to rooting
corruption out of U.S. aid programs in Russia. She is
particularly passionate about the $1 billion of commodity aid
being shipped this year. "I want 1999 to be the year we learn
from our mistakes. I have repeatedly called for monitoring of
this $1.1 billion aid package in the past, and the conclusions of
the [Department of Agriculture] Inspector General's report and
recent media reports of money laundering of prior aid prove
that my earlier call was justified." Kaptur swipes at the
administration's earlier rosy picture of corruption-free food aid:
"It is quite easy to say there are no problems when you are not
looking for them."
. . . .
continued next post |
