Gore is communist progeny (published article w/link):
Why the Vice President Knows So Much About Russia:
Tycoon Armand Hammer had the politician's father 'in his back pocket'
By Patrick Cockburn
Moscow. 21 May 2000
Early in the US presidential campaign, Vice President Al Gore's attempt to follow President Clinton into the White House was almost capsized by allegations that he had turned a blind eye to corruption in Russia despite frequent contact with that country's leaders.
The Vice President was vulnerable because between 1993 and 1998 he had taken a leading role in formulating US policy towards Russia as chairman of a joint commission on relations between the countries. The former Russian prime minister Victor Chernomyrdin was joint chairman.
Mr Gore had boosted the commission as evidence that he was a serious international statesman and more than a decorative figure in the Clinton White House. The claim blew up in his face last year when critics asked why, if he knew so much about Russia, he only learnt from the newspapers about the scandal over the laundering of $10bn in Russian money through the Bank of New York.
Criticism of the Vice President over the Chernomyrdin-Gore commission missed the real target, say sources in Moscow; he was telling the truth when he said he knew a great deal about Russia. He could not publicly explain, however, that his knowledge stemmed from the extraordinary relationship between his father, Senator Al Gore Sr, and Armand Hammer, the American multi-millionaire, who, after meeting Lenin, became the Soviet Union's first foreign investor in 1921. Hammer also served, according to secret Soviet documents since released, as the conduit for laundering money to Soviet intelligence operations and Communist parties abroad.
"The American press missed the point over the Gore-Chernomyrdin scandal," a diplomat in Moscow said last week. "Gore had access to the Soviet and then the Russian leadership long before he met Chernomyrdin because of his father's links to Hammer and Hammer's high-level contacts in the Soviet Union."
The Vice President is often presented as a wooden and somewhat simple- minded clone of Mr Clinton. In fact his political background is far more interesting and complex. His political career developed out of that of his father, Senator Al Gore Sr of Tennessee, who gave up his position in 1971 to become head of the coal division of Hammer's oil company Occidental Petroleum. His annual salary was $500,000.
The link between Hammer and Al Gore Sr was intimate and went back many years to when he was a congressman from Tennessee. Hammer once said, according to a US source, that he had Gore in his "back pocket".
As early as 1950, according to Edward Jay Epstein's superb biography of Hammer (Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer, Random House, New York, 1996) he made Congressman Gore his partner in a profitable cattle-breeding business. Hammer needed political protection. J Edgar Hoover, even before he became head of the FBI, had been tracking him as a possible Soviet agent. For once Hoover was right, though that only became clear in 1996 when the Russian government released secret archives to Mr Epstein. In Congress Al Gore Sr helped to keep the FBI off Hammer's back.
Hammer, who died in 1990, was notorious for advancing his business interests by the systematic bribery of politicians and government officials.
He won an important oil concession for Occidental in Libya in 1967 by paying a larger bribe than anybody else. Senator Gore Sr stood beside him on the podium at the oilfield opening ceremony the following year.
Al Gore Jr, as freshman senator for Tennessee, inherited his father's connection with Hammer and Occidental. In 1981, Hammer was his guest at the inauguration of President Reagan, just as he had been the guest of his father at five previous presidential inaugurations. The link with Occidental was not broken by Hammer's death. As recently as 1996 the Vice President, according to reports, played an important role in the privatising of Elk Hills naval petroleum reserve in California, later bought by Occidental for $3.5bn.
Unnoticed in the furore over the Vice President's association with Occidental in the US was the degree to which he had also benefited from Hammer's and Occidental's connections, before 1990, in Moscow. The two potential scandals now threatening his presidential ambitions – his relationship with Russian leaders and an over-close relationship with Occidental – both originate in his family's involvement in the business activities of Armand Hammer in the Soviet Union and the US.
Hammer left Moscow in 1929. The Soviet Union no longer needed him as a showcase foreign capitalist – Lenin's motive for giving him the concession to an asbestos mine in the Urals – or to secretly fund its agents and sympathisers abroad. He had briefly owned a profitable pencil factory, but ultimately lost money in the young Soviet Union.
His one remaining concession was to act as agent for selling art treasures now owned by the Soviet state. Even that was not quite what it seemed. His first attempted sale was of a supposedly lost Rembrandt painting called The Circumcision of Christ, which turned out to be a recent fake.
Hammer returned to Moscow in 1961. Senator Gore Sr arranged semi- official sponsorship of his trip by the US Commerce Department.
He met Nikita Khrushchev, then Soviet leader, but it was 10 years later that he really began to do serious business once again in the Soviet Union. His method of cultivating the Soviet hierarchy differed little from his approach to political leaders in the US. In Moscow he became a friend of Yakaterina Furtseva, the well-connected Minister of Culture, who soon after began to build a luxurious holiday home for herself. She died in Moscow in 1974 after coming under investigation for corruption. A former associate of Hammer later testified in the US that she was paid a bribe of $100,000. During the same period Hammer also arranged for $54,000 in laundered $100 bills to be paid to the Nixon White House to help finance the Watergate cover-up.
Despite the corruption of officials, the Soviet Union got more than its money's worth from Hammer. He genuinely wanted to be seen as an architect of détente. Before he died, aged 92, he poured enormous sums from Occidental's coffers into hopelessly uneconomic projects in the Soviet Union. A vast and ugly trade centre, built by Hammer, still rises beside the Moskva river in central Moscow.
Not surprisingly Soviet and later Russian leaders – often the same people – favour Mr Gore for the presidency as an associate of their favourite capitalist. Andrei Kortunov, president of the Moscow Science Foundation, and an expert on relations with the US, says: "The traditional establishment likes the Gore family." On meeting Al Gore Jr in Washington in 1985, he recalls being struck by the senator's knowledge of the Soviet Union.
Mr Gore was right in saying he knows a lot about Russia, but he is hardly likely to publicise the reason why.
(source: lizmichael.com
[Look here, commie boy, in the '60s and '70s only the potheads and sailor boys went to Groton. Don't BS me anymore. In fact, don't even respond]. |
