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Al Gore's Red Connections
by William Norman Grigg
On February 10th,
Representative Gerald Solomon (R-NY), chairman of the House Rules Committee, sent a letter
to the White House requesting information on the October 1993 meeting between President
Clinton and Russian mobster Grigori Loutchansky. Loutchansky, head of a Vienna-based KGB
front known as Nordex, is regarded by law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the
world as a drug smuggler, money launderer, and arms dealer. However, according to the
London Sunday Times, his conversation with President Clinton dealt with the
possibility of making Loutchansky a diplomatic intermediary in nuclear disarmament talks
between the U.S. and Ukraine.
Solomon's February 10th letter was his second request for
information about Loutchansky, and so far the Administration has refused to cooperate. The
congressman's next letter should expand his inquiry to include material about possible
connections between Vice President Al Gore and Russian mobster Vladimir Gusinsky.
Russia's Wealthiest Man
In early February, Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and
his entourage visited Washington, DC to attend the semiannual meetings of the U.S.-Russian
Joint Commission on Economic and Technical Cooperation, better known as the
Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission (GCC). The GCC, which grew out of the 1994 Vancouver summit
meeting between Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin, is a forum in which U.S. Cabinet officials
and their Russian counterparts can create a framework for joint ventures in space
exploration, science and technology, defense conversion, environmental initiatives, public
health issues, agribusiness, and economic development. The body could be described as a
binational commission on U.S./Russian "convergence" -- and the nature of that
convergence is personified in Vladimir Gusinsky, a shadowy Russian businessman who
accompanied Chernomyrdin to Washington.
Gusinsky, a 44-year-old banking and media mogul, is considered in
some circles to be Russia's wealthiest man -- and one of the top contenders for the title
of "godfather" of the KGB-created Russian mafia. Until January of this year,
Gusinsky was director of the powerful Moscow-based Most Bank. As commentator Georgie Anne
Geyer observes, Most "was on the CIA's recent list of banks with Russian mafia
connections." According to the February 6th Washington Times, U.S.
diplomatic sources believe that Prime Minister Chernomyrdin "allowed Mr. Gusinsky to
be the driving force in orchestrating his visit."
Gusinsky has a personal security force of more than 1,000 troops,
many of them drawn from the KGB's Fifth Chief Directorate -- the branch of the secret
police that carried out internal surveillance, political repression, and torture.
Furthermore, one of Gusinsky's closest advisers is former KGB Deputy Director Filipp
Bobkov, a Stalin-era Chekist. KGB critic Yevgenia Albats notes that "Bobkov is an
especially revered figure in the KGB. He came to work for the organs in 1945, when [KGB
head] Beria was still alive, yet survived Beria and eleven subsequent secret police
chairmen. During the 1970s and '80s, Bobkov effectively became the KGB's real
chairman...." Among Bobkov's special talents is a knack for fomenting ethnic and
religious conflicts and staging acts of terrorism as pretexts for KGB crack-downs in the
name of preserving "order."
Bobkov was supposedly cashiered from the KGB in 1991 after the
Soviet attack on the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Shortly thereafter he was involved in
the August 1991 "hardliners' coup" against Mikhail Gorbachev. But rather than
going before a firing squad or being thrown into prison, Bobkov turned up as an
"adviser" to Gusinsky at Most Bank. Sovietologist Victor Yasmann, citing
information published in the Russian press, writes that Bobkov "is the actual
director of [Most Bank], which has close ties to Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and Prime
Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin."
"Gusinsky's media contacts and his emergence as a banking mogul
would not have happened without Bobkov's patronage," a Russian analyst explained to THE
NEW AMERICAN. "He is a pure creature of the new
criminal class in Russia. He came from the Komsomol [Young Communist League] background,
and began his career in the Gorbachev era. He has no native business ability, and yet he
is among the half-dozen or so wealthiest men in Russia now, at the age of 44. This is easy
to understand once it is understood that the real man behind Gusinsky is Bobkov."
Moscow's "Narco-Group"
According to Yasmann, Bobkov and a select few of his KGB colleagues
compose the "Moscow Narco- Group," an organized crime network that essentially
controls money laundering and drug trafficking throughout the former Soviet Union. These
KGB veterans "linked up with KGB men working in drug producing areas of Laos, Burma,
Cambodia, and Korea, and with the KGB station at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam," Yassman
writes.
Another key player in this KGB-supervised pipeline is Usman Imayev,
known in some circles as the "Chechen Pablo Escobar." A graduate of Moscow's
Patrice Lumumba University -- an academy of terrorism for Third World Marxists -- Imayev
was the head of the Chechen central bank and human rights society and lead negotiator for
the Chechen "independence" movement in talks with the Russian Federation.
Although Imayev was captured by Russian troops in October 1994 and delivered to Moscow, he
was quickly released and allowed to return to Chechnya -- where he used his connections to
benefit Bobkov's drug-smuggling network.
Imayev has worked closely with Boris Agapov, vice president of the
central Asian republic of Ingushetiya. Agapov is a former KGB lieutenant general who
headed the intelligence directorate for the KGB border troops. A Russian analyst explained
to THE NEW AMERICAN that Agapov "has
very strong connections within Pakistan and Afghanistan from the Afghan war, including
contacts within the mujahideen, as well as connections with drug dealers all across
Soviet Central Asia. All these threads of drug smuggling lead back to Bobkov, and
Gusinsky, once again, is entirely a creation of Bobkov."
It is through Bobkov's KGB network, and the Most Bank's financial
clout, that the "Moscow Narco- Group" was able to become (in Yasmann's words)
"a bridge between [the Soviet] regions and drug lords in Italy, Romania, Colombia,
and Cuba. These former KGB officers thus took control of, and expanded, the drug route
from Afghanistan via Chechnya and Russia to Western Europe and the United States."
A KGB Hit
"In the West," Yasmann concludes, "the mafia operates
at the margins of public life, but in Russia, organized crime includes a significant
portion of the Russian political elite and of the very people who are supposed to be
fighting the criminals."
Once again, the KGB played a pivotal role in this turn of events. On
August 23, 1990, Nikolai Kruchin, the Administrative Director of the Soviet Communist
Party, issued a document entitled "Emergency Measures to Organize Commercial and
Foreign Economic Activity for the Party," which envisioned using joint economic
ventures with the West "to systematically create structures of an 'invisible' party
economy...." A year later, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov issued an order defining the
agency's new mission as that of defending "economic reforms" against the new
"criminal element" -- which in practice meant defending the "invisible
party economy." By 1992, according to Yasmann, at least 80 percent of all joint
ventures in the Russian Federation were either controlled or infiltrated by the KGB.
"Assassination is a tool of business competition" in
Russia's KGB-dominated economy, according to the December 26, 1996 issue of Forbes magazine.
Forbes describes the 1995 murder of Russian Business Roundtable founder Ivan
Kivelidi "by poison (an obscure nerve toxin) applied to the rim of his coffee
cup" -- a KGB-style "contract hit." "Such is the business environment
today that the men at the top often have use for the shadowy army of killers and thugs who
work further down in the scale of corruption, running prostitute and protection rackets.
The old KGB, a gangster outfit itself, used to call this side of things 'wet affairs.'
Every large business in Russia today has its own department of wet affairs."
Ties to Gore
Vladimir Gusinsky, the Komsomol-educated front man for the KGB's
international drug network, is the perfect ambassador for this business community.
Furthermore, according to the Washington Times, "Mr. Gusinsky, with the
blessing of Yeltsin chief of staff Anatoly Chubais, has ... become an intimate of the
Yeltsin government." Gusinsky apparently has attempted to cultivate ties with Vice
President Gore as well. The Times notes that "there have been reports
that Mr. Gusinsky was organizing a Washington gala [during his visit] with Vice President
Al Gore to be the main guest, but a spokesman for Mr. Gore's office would say only that
'there is no party on the public schedule.'"
Whether or not Gore met with Gusinsky, the commission Gore co-chairs
with Prime Minister Chernomyrdin has become a major conduit through which taxpayer
subsidies are directed to joint economic ventures. Following a GCC meeting in Moscow last
July, Gore and Chernomyrdin announced the creation of a $400 million lending facility in
Russia that would be operated by the Chase Manhattan Bank and backed by the Overseas
Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) -- that is, by American taxpayers.
During the February GCC session, Gore and Chernomyrdin met in
Chicago with corporate leaders from Amoco, Motorola, Caterpillar, Cargill, and Archer
Daniels Midland. According to a report by the Agence France Presse, Gore
proudly pointed out that the Russian delegation included "communist and other
anti-reform members of the Duma" who had come to the U.S. to explore the possibility
of forging economic ties with American businesses.
According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the February GCC session
ended with the signing of "a number of commercial contracts ... with the
participation of OPIC and Eximbank [the taxpayer-supported Export-Import Bank] on the US
side." Furthermore, according to Duma member Vladimir Medvedev (who was part of the
Russian delegation), the GCC has "prepared the ground for establishing closer
contacts between the U.S. Congress and the Russian Parliament on a practical basis."
Like Father, Like Son
One inevitable result of the convergence fostered by the GCC will be
a dramatic increase in political corruption here. "If you think the Indonesians have
been muddying up American morality with their 'generosity' to the White House, you haven't
seen anything yet," predicts Georgie Anne Geyer, who warns that "in this shrewd
and cunning new Russia, American na�vet� will hardly be rewarded."
But it is not "na�vet�" that inspires American business
and political elites to embark on taxpayer- supported joint ventures with Russian
gangsters; it is opportunism. If Vladimir Gusinsky symbolizes the new Russian business
elite, the patron saint of American businessmen plunging into taxpayer-backed joint
ventures in Russia would be the late Armand Hammer, Lenin's "path" to America's
financial resources. Hammer was the first Western businessman to participate in
KGB-controlled joint ventures in the Soviet Union. Designated the "Capitalist
Prince" by the KGB, Hammer dutifully served the Soviets for seven decades and became
the first -- and only -- American capitalist to be awarded the Order of Lenin.
Hammer's spectacularly corrupt career was aided in numerous ways by
Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, who was a partner in various Hammer enterprises for
more than four decades. As Edward Jay Epstein documents in Dossier, his
recent biography of Hammer, the elder Gore helped Hammer make connections with American
Presidents and used his influence to help Hammer's Occidental Petroleum company gain
access to foreign political leaders. But, most importantly, Gore's ties to Hammer deterred
the FBI from pursuing an investigation of the industrialist as a Soviet agent of
influence.
When the elder Gore retired from the Senate, his services to Hammer
paid off handsomely: He received a $500,000-a-year job as head of Occidental's coal
division. After the younger Gore was elected to the Senate in 1980, he continued a
tradition begun by his father by inviting Hammer into the "senators only"
section during President Reagan's inauguration.
Accordingly, it is appropriate that Al Gore Jr., whose family
fortune was built in substantial measure by his father's contacts with a Soviet money
launderer, would be co-chairman of an international commission intended to help the next
generation of Armand Hammer-style "Capitalist Princes" develop contacts with
KGB-dominated businesses in Russia.
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