-Caveat Lector-
FRIDAY
SEPTEMBER 17
1999
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Russia's X mysteries
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By Anne Williamson
� 1999 WorldNetDaily.com
With each passing day of the Bank of New York-Russian money scandal, the
family of suspect Russian companies whose names end in "-ex" expands:
Mabetex, Benex, Forex, Ostex, Torfinex and Dimalex. Once again, Papa Bear
"-Ex," Nordex, and its founder Grigori Loutchansky are in the news.
Fingered in the spring of 1997 as one more dubious foreign contributor to
Clinton's re-election campaign, Loutchansky -- sounding like the frustrated
Rodney Dangerfield of alleged Russian nuke smugglers -- had a scatological
mouthful to say. "A big American game of big bulls---!" he bellowed over the
telephone line from corporate headquarters in Vienna, "It's those bloody
gangsters in the CIA!"
Look, from Loutchansky's point of view, aspiring to Friend-of-Bill status
turned into a real nightmare. Think about it. One day you're having your mug
snapped alongside Bill Clinton's in the White House and you're carrying
messages from POTUS to POU (President of Ukraine) and the next your good
name is being drug through the mud and your once-proud firm's reputation is
besmirched. Other campaign donors got OPIC and Ex-Im Bank support, a night
in the Lincoln bedroom, or a ride on Air Force One.
But you? All you got were your hot deals in Kazakhstan with Canada's Placer
Dome, U.S. Steel and Mobil Oil trashed, visa refusals from the U.S., Canada,
Great Britain, and Hong Kong, your phone calls monitored by NSA, a clutch of
unflattering newspaper stories and a letter of inquiry from a congressional
investigatory committee. Talk about slings and arrows.
"Americans consider us to be second rate people!" Loutchansky fumed.
I first stumbled on Nordex years ago in Baku when it was still a provincial
Soviet capital, utterly bereft of Texas oilmen. It was there that I
confronted a man whom I was sure was my KGB tail, but who protested, saying
he was a simple biznesman who'd "left the service." But why?
The question got me a shot of vodka and the guy's story at a corner table in
a tiny bar in a dreary hotel next to the Caspian Sea. His last assignment
while "in the service," he said, was accompanying shipments of Soviet gold
bars to Austria and something in the course of those operations that I
couldn't quite grasp had led to the career change, but he did say I ought to
remember the name "Nordex."
Naturally, I forgot all about Nordex until years later in Moscow when I read
in a William Safire column that "it's remarkable how the name Nordex causes
intelligence faces to turn to stone." For laughs, I looked Nordex up in the
Moscow Business Telephone Guide, an entrepreneurial asset of the new age
regnant in the capital, and to my surprise found the listing with seven
telephone numbers. This was serious blat ("pull"), very serious blat, since
nobody, but nobody, had seven published telephone numbers in Moscow in 1995.
After a day's long marathon of dialing, a cheerful voice answered,
"Ministerstvo Innostrannykh Del." This was unbelievable! The Foreign
Ministry? I stated my business.
"Oh, how lucky you are! I was just passing and almost didn't pick up the
phone and not only that, but I know everything about Nordex. You say you're
American?" a certain Aleksandr Konstantinovich queried.
I was stunned. It's a journalist's dream to hear anything so normal, so
friendly from Russian officialdom; it was impossible not to be suspicious.
Konstantinovich suggested that I call two days hence mid-morning, saying
we'd schedule a meeting for that day. And then with the breezy suddenness of
an Englishman's "Cheerio," he was gone.
Naturally, Konstantinovich blew me off, and days more of dialing only got me
frazzled. Then, by chance, I stumbled on paydirt again while leafing through
a 1993 issue of VIP, the vanity organ of the commercialized nomenklatura.
Reading a boastful interview with Vladimir Shcherbakov, the last first
deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union and today president of the
International Foundation for Privatization and Private Investment (FPI), I
learned that FPI's charter was legitimized by Gorbachev's signature and
approved by 13 heads of what were still constituent republics on Sept. 14,
1991 -- a time when the ink on Boris Yeltsin's decree banning the Communist
Party was barely dry -- and that the foreign partner amongst the three
founders was an Austrian firm, Nordex GmbH.
In the interview, the nimble-footed Shcherbakov reported excellent relations
with the new regime of "eager young reformers" -- Yeltsin, Gaidar and
Chubais, all hail-fellows-well-met -- along with similarly sympathetic
connections to the EBRD, the IMF and the U.N. Industrial Development
Organization. Shcherbakov even bragged about FPI's "new approach to the
problem of the property of the Western Army Groups in Eastern Germany that
comes down to its joint exploitation by Russian and German businesses," a
mind-boggling admission considering that a year after the interview was
published, the Russian scandal was Bonn's claim that Soviet weaponry sales
to rogue regimes originating in the Western Army Group had amounted to a $4
billion criminal take.
A week later, I stumbled again, right into the company of a former employee
of FPI, who spoke through clenched teeth while saying, "I don't and didn't
like this business. It's not an honest one, I decided I didn't want to be
involved."
But exactly why?
"It's not a well-known organization, but it's one of the most wealthy and
most powerful organizations in Russia. Their main business is acting as a
sort of professional legal business for companies in the regions. They go
knock on the government's door and get some money for the companies, or
subsidies, or tax breaks. Then they take their commission. I can't say it
publicly, I can't prove my position with documents, but I know they were
privatizing companies, the very best companies, before we had a
privatization program."
And what about Nordex?
He clammed up at that, "I won't say one word about Nordex and you shouldn't
even pronounce the name."
When I tracked down an acquaintance with military intelligence who'd been
helpful in fleshing out a "Jewish mafia" scheme to swindle the government
over a pulp and paper mill on the Volga, he too showed a sudden concern for
his visitor at the mention of Nordex. "Anechka," he murmured softly, "I want
to help you, and I am doing so now in telling you, and I am underlining
these words, not to ask anybody any more questions about Nordex." I've lived
long enough that when guys twice my size preface a warning with the
equivalent of "dear Anniekins" and I was in a country where overly nosy
journalists sometimes explode -- literally -- I pay attention. I put Nordex
to bed in a manila file folder.
Imagine then my surprise to discover that no one had shown similar concern
for our own fair-haired boy in the White House, that Grigori Loutchansky, in
the company of one Sam Domb, a New York real estate businessman and DNC
Trustee good for $160,000 worth of support in 1993-94, was so close to Bill
Clinton as to be photographed. Intentionally. Not only that, but he gets a
letter thanking him for his support and a second dinner invite for January
1995. Out came the manila file folder.
I called up a high Russian government muckety-muck, who when I told him the
news, mumbled, "Oh, that's bad." He described Loutchansky as "sort of an
exile" and confirmed what my man in Baku had told me, "It's definitely not a
simple story because his business was a KGB cover-up operation in the very
beginning, a kind of firm in the West which developed underground and after
the original objective disappeared, he used it for making money. He had very
peculiar connections in Russia, very peculiar connections, but it cost a few
figures in the government. It's not simple anyway."
Not according to the Time Magazine reporters who took up Loutchansky's offer
to examine his books in July 1996. Time's report detailed deals involving
PM Viktor Chernomyrdin, Moscow Mayor Yury Lyuzhkov and former Soviet
Minister of Metallurgy and hometown Yeltsin crony Oleg Soskovets, scud
missiles, nuclear smuggling and multimillion dollar transfers through a
network of Swiss bank accounts and dummy companies set up in tax havens like
the Isle of Man and Liechtenstein. Loutchansky told Time that the very fact
he was framed by Boris Pugo, former head of the Latvian KGB, and served a
two-year prison term for embezzlement, was proof he never worked for the
KGB.
"I was in the gulag in Russia! I was an activist fighting against
Communism," he hollered, when I asked him about the incident with Pugo, "I
was accused of Zionism, an ideology said to be against the USSR, at a time
when Pugo was the first secretary of the Komsomol. He didn't recommend me
for CPSU membership personally, but administratively. I needed his signature
for a position with the Central Committee of the Latvian Party, which found
summer work for students. The embezzlement charge was all nonsense, it was a
simple barter deal."
I didn't get a chance to ask how one could both be an activist against
Communism and an employee of the Latvian Central Committee when we were off
to the races again, "All these charges are 1000 percent not true! The CIA
was bugging my telephones without the Austrian government's permission; they
are working in the interests of big Western monopolists with credits to the
government. You, the West will be responsible for Communist revanchism. That
stuff in Time magazine about a report from German intelligence, they have no
file on me and they were unable to introduce evidence about me in the court
case I just won today, and that so-called report from the KGB, it's nothing
but bulls--- for sale, a digest of different articles and some imagination.
That s--- about me shipping scud missiles to the Middle East, my family
lives in Israel, why would I do something like that?" demands Loutchansky,
who did possess an Israeli passport.
The missiles were on a Nordex plane that was leased and besides, Loutchansky
said, it was the USSR that sold a factory for scud production to Iran in
1991, not Nordex.
It all began so promisingly, lamented Loutchansky when in the late 1980s he
was appointed the Western representative of Soviet collective farm Adazhi,
"which was one of the best, most modern farms. We were shipping fertilizer,
raw materials and steel." Hey! That is one heck of a collective farm that
not only ships steel but racks up annual profits of $2 billion; "OK, so we
expanded."
"I've been to Kansas, to visit Fairmont, an agro firm," he continued,
plaintively. Funny, how credible a connection to Kansas makes a man sound.
His voice trailed off weakly, like maybe he was thinking he wasn't going to
get to go to nice places like Kansas any more, it was all coming apart so
quickly.
Sure he knew Shcherbakov, "a clever man," and he helped him to start his
business, but Nordex withdrew in 1994, and as far as the Western Forces
Group, Loutchansky says, he "withdrew voluntarily" when he saw "they would
be trying to get their piece." Why wouldn't he know Soskovets, the former
Soviet Minister of Metallurgy, when Nordex is selling steel? Why wouldn't he
know Chernomyrdin, the former Soviet Minister of Energy, when Nordex is
selling oil? He knew Lyuzhkov knew back when the Moscow mayor had real power
as the head of the fruit and vegetable mafia (Agripol), but they had no
business together. As far as Sam Domb goes, he met him in Israel and they
were thinking of restoring a Manhattan hotel for Russian tourists, "I was
introduced to Mr. Clinton as a successful Russian businessman, who was not
asking for money, but wanting to invest his own into American real estate.
"Mr. Clinton remarked that he'd just come from Congress and that he was
worried about Ukraine getting nuclear material from missiles to Russia and I
said, 'I supply oil to the Ukraine and know President Kravchuk,' and that's
when Mr. Clinton asked me to tell Kravchuk the United States wanted to help.
Nothing more! As far as Sam Domb goes, I haven't seen him for three or four
years."
Only Christopher Ruddy, then with the Western Journalism Center, managed to
flush out Sam Domb. Domb told Ruddy he didn't have any idea who Loutchansky
was before having met him at the dinner, but was then stumped to explain why
he was photographed with Loutchansky and Clinton. But Domb didn't need
$160,000 from Loutchansky for his DNC contribution since, besides being a
heavy supporter of Likuud, he's a multimillionaire. So why then was
Loutchansky anxious enough for his second DNC invitation, $25,000 a head, to
race to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv to attach a copy of it to his visa
application?
"He was probably being extra-cautious. We know of no violation of U.S. laws,
but maybe Loutchansky knew differently," said the CIA man I engaged on the
matter.
"We know Nordex had three objectives: the first, a business, the second, a
front for the KGB and the third, crime. So what did he want? Respectability.
He is fighting very hard."
That was true. Loutchansky offered anyone a look at his books, he had his
attorney, Thomas Spencer, offer his appearance before Congress, but Hannes
Reichmann of Wirtschafts Woche, an Austrian business magazine, laughed at
Loutchansky's boast of winning a court case against him, "Loutchansky didn't
win any court case. The judge asked for more evidence, which my lawyers and
I have decided to provide. I already published a facsimile of an excerpt
from German intelligence's report on Nordex. Now, he's shutting down his
business in Vienna, and his partners are fighting with him."
What about those numbers at the Foreign Ministry?
"A fluke, probably," the CIA man shrugged, "They might have just gotten so
screwed up in their own arrangements, the phone was ringing in Nordex's
office and they forgot that was a line meant for the Foreign Ministry
supposedly. Sometimes lower level people are just stupid."
Sometimes higher level folks are too.
Only now, with many billions down the Kremlin's rathole, are the West's
lamestream media and spendthrift legislators interested in learning what
happened. Only now do fleeced taxpayers learn that the men to whom their
resources were sent for the purpose of building a new Russia were in league
from day one with the exhausted Soviet nomenklatura in a scheme to loot
Russia's wealth and park it in the West.
Nordex vacated its offices in Vienna some time ago, but not before a
congressional investigator and a security guard flew to Vienna to meet with
Loutchansky. According to the investigator, an unrepentant Loutchansky
shrugged, "Yeah, so OK, I was trying to bribe the president of the United
States. So what? In my country, it's normal."
Indeed. So what? After all, one man's freshly-laundered bribe is another
man's million dollar mortgage guarantee on a pricey, post-presidential New
York suburban Westchester County homestead.
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Anne Williamson has written for the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times,
Spy magazine, Film Comment and Premiere. An expert on Soviet-Russian
affairs, she is currently working on a book, "Contagion: How America
Betrayed Russia."
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