Gore's Embrace

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 27, 1999 | by J. Michael Waller

Money-laundering charges have raised questions about the vice president's warm relationship with Russian President Boris Yeltsin's corrupt, inept administration.

Vice President Al Gore is in the doghouse over his no-holds-barred support for Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and it isn't just his Republican critics who are pointing the fingers. One of the Democrats' shining stars, former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, who is challenging Gore for the presidential nomination, blasted the administration's Russia policy after reports that Russian gangsters, possibly in league with top Russian officials, laundered billions of dollars of U.S.-backed loans through New York banks.

"Our assistance and lending policies," said Bradley, "have done very little to further our strategic goal, the needs of the Russian people or the cause of Russian reform. Billions of dollars have been promised to Russians, but far too much money has been siphoned off by untrustworthy Russian `capitalists.'" It was an implicit swipe at Gore, who was one of the main champions of the taxpayer-subsidized loans to the Russian Central Bank believed to have been laundered through the Bank of New York, which happens to be in the state that first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton wants to represent in the Senate.

No one is rushing to Gore's defense. With most of official Washington out of town for the Labor Day holiday, few were available for comment. But a spokesman for retiring New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the influential foreign-policy voice whose seat Hillary Clinton hopes to take next year, tells Insight, "He's following the issue but we have not made any statement." The Democratic Leadership Council, which President Clinton headed when he was governor of Arkansas, said it had no one qualified to comment. And a spokeswoman for Mrs. Clinton, when asked for comment, said, "Ugh. I don't know about that one."

Painting Gore further into the corner are revelations from the U.S. intelligence community that while the vice president was pushing for more cash to Russia, he was rejecting CIA reports that his Russian interlocutors were crooked or involved with organized crime.

"Though no one has charged that Gore knew of the financial diversions," reported the Washington Post, "the still emerging money-laundering scandal has tendrils that could run close to the vice president." Newsweek opined, "It may be Al Gore who pays for the sins of the Russian elite." In a Washington Post op-ed, David Ignatius asked, "What did the vice president know about the looting of Russia by organized crime, and why didn't he do more to stop it?"

Gore finds himself in the hot seat because of his unique relationship with certain Russian leaders alleged to have participated in some of the looting. Unlike any vice president in U.S. history, he has taken a lead strategic foreign-policy role. The first Clinton administration was just three months old in April 1993 when, in partnership with then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Gore headed the U.S.-Russian Commission on Economic and Technological Cooperation, popularly known as the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission.

The commission was designed to work on a range of energy, industrial, technological and economic issues and to cut through bureaucracy. Supporters say that in the course of the often rocky U.S.-Russian relationship, the commission provided an even keel for conducting bilateral relations on a daily basis. Critics argue that it was a funnel for U.S. cash and technology into Russia's corrupt bureaucracy and banking sectors.

Gore won bipartisan accolades for his commission work, gaining himself statesmanlike status. But Chernomyrdin, ousted last year, lost his luster amid reports he had privatized a nine-figure portion of Gazprom, the Russian natural-gas monopoly he once headed, to himself. With the latest reports that the U.S.-backed International Monetary Fund, or IMF, loans which Gore helped engineer to prop up Yeltsin may have been diverted and laundered through the Bank of New York, Gore's relationship with Chernomyrdin suddenly threatened his undoing as a world statesman.

Surveying the ruins of the administration's Russia policy that in the end failed to foster permanent pro-Western, free-market reforms, the New York Times Magazine reported, "When this checkered record is eventually held up to the light during a presidential campaign, Gore will have much to answer for."

The Gore-Chernomyrdin commission, whose informal name has changed with each new Russian premier, has operated as part of the Russia policy developed by senior administration officials, including Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. Gore's national-security adviser, Leon Fuerth, is regarded as the commission's de-facto executive secretary and operates as a peer to the national-security adviser, secretary of state and secretary of defense. The commission helped muster bipartisan domestic support for continued bailouts of Moscow, in part by enlisting the political clout of the various U.S. banks and corporations that benefit from its taxpayer-funded programs. The U.S.-Russia Business Council, a private organization promoting bilateral trade, has boasted in its literature of setting the agendas of several of the commission's semiannual meetings.