Gore's Embrace

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

Career diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow agree with Ermarth's view. E. Wayne Merry, head of the internal political section from 1991 to 1994, and his successor, Thomas E. Graham, Jr., recently have spoken out. According to former Washington Post Moscow correspondent Robert Kaiser, Merry "said the embassy was under constant pressure to find evidence that American policy was producing tangible successes, especially after the creation of the Gore-Chernomyrdin working group.... This organization absorbed the energies of many American diplomats in Moscow, Merry said, and it soon became `a Soviet-style bureaucracy in which success was mandatory, and any information that would contradict success simply was filed forever.'"

A top secret 1995 CIA report on Chernomyrdin and other Russian leaders, which reportedly contained information on their corrupt activity and ties to organized criminal figures, enraged Gore and his senior staff, who angrily returned it to the CIA with the now-famous "barnyard epithet" scribbled across the cover.

Insight has learned that in the months following the report on Chernomyrdin, a debate raged in the intelligence community about whether it should be de-tasked from reporting on the corruption of the administration's Russian partners. Some intelligence officers tell Insight they believe the de-tasking order came from Gore's office. "It got worse in 1997," says a former CIA official. "They reorganized everything [in the CIA] to remove everyone with experience. They took the Russian organized-crime [duty] from the old Russia and KGB hands" and reassigned it to the anticrime unit -- "a stockpile for deadwood," in the words of the former official. The CIA anticrime office, according to the source, had little experience in Russia or on the Russian intelligence services involved with organized crime, yet "put their own spin on everything" in analyses to decisionmakers.

Gore long has taken a see-no-evil approach to shady businessmen, criminals and gangsters. Indeed, former congressional investigator Ed Timperlake says this attitude has blinded the vice president toward high-level corruption in Russia. In 1995, Gore and Clinton posed for photos at a Miami campaign fund-raiser with Ukrainian tycoon Vadim Rabinovitch -- whose visa the State Department had revoked a month earlier on the grounds that he is tied to organized crime. Rabinovitch vigorously denies the State Department allegations. Congressional investigators found that the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign accepted more than $1 million in illegal donations from Macao prostitution racketeer Ng Lapseng and individuals connected with the Chinese Triad organized-crime group and that Gore had John Huang, the Democratic National Committee fund-raiser and alleged Chinese spy, accompany him on his 1996 fund-raising event at a Buddhist temple in California where Chinese money was laundered into the Clinton-Gore campaign. At a 1994 fund-raiser, Gore posed with Andrei Kozlenok and Soviet-born David and Ashot Shagirian of a San Francisco company called Golden ADA, then under FBI and IRS investigation for selling tons of diamonds, gold and antique jewelry looted from the Russian national treasury. The Feds ultimately shut it down. Ashot Shagirian pleaded guilty to tax evasion in early 1998; his brother David is believed to be in hiding in Europe.