Ruphus -> RE: American Freedom? (Dec. 8 2012 11:17:57)
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Hi Bill, I guess you are having fun with down playing "a SPIEGEL article" I read somewhere but can't find. That was not just one article as you certainly recognized but reports over the course of years. I have just been trying to find something on the US plunder fellowship, but such is really unreal under means of dial-in conncetions. What I came accross is however the kind of answer your political fraction released as motto, in case of the taboo of USSR looting was to be dealt with. That answer you have been reluctant to bring forward. Here is a greatly illustrating example of the classical mixture of facts and disguising paintings that the conservative world floats on: Link: http://www.csseo.org/Activities/2000/conv_elt/altri_pap/SeeingRussia.pdf Excert: quote:
For me personally-and for a number of younger analysts more influential than me in later years-an important learning experience was the "Saga of the KGB Money." In mid-spring 1992, early in the Yeltsin regime, a retired colleague visited me to report that the international detective firm for which he now worked had been hired by the Yeltsin- Gaidar government to find vast sums essentially stolen by the KGB on behalf of itself and the CPSU and deposited abroad in bank accounts and front companies. Might not U.S. intelligence help to recover this money for the benefit of Russian reforms? Our specialists on the KGB had, indeed, observed such activity since the late 1980s.10 Subsequent evidence reveals that it stemmed from top-level CPSU instructions in the mid-80s. Using semi-private cooperatives, the KGB sold cheaply acquired Soviet commodities abroad at world prices, putting the proceeds into disguised foreign accounts and front companies, including, according to many public sources, the later notorious Nordex. Initially the KGB objective was simply commercial cover. But the program evolved into operating businesses for off-budget revenues, and from there into avenues for squirreling away funds for the safe retirement or political comeback of embattled communist leaders. Lines of business came to include money laundering, arms and drug trafficking, and other plainly criminal activities. Before long, intelligence, business, politics and crime blurred indistinguishably into each other. What sums were involved? Some in the U.S. intelligence community estimated about $20 billion. But there was a wide range of uncertainty; one private analysis I learned about later estimated $4-6 billion; Russian press speculations ran to $100 billion. By all reckonings the amounts were very substantial. Could U.S. intelligence help find the money? Specialists in collection disciplines informed me that we could indeed help, although at some risk to our sources, should, for example, court cases expose them. It would be rather similar to tracking money in pursuit of drug traffickers. But should the U.S. Government render such help to Russia? For a policy decision, the late Ed Hewitt, then running Soviet affairs on the National Security Council, assembled officials from State, Treasury, Defense and the intelligence community. The answer was no. Some worried about risk to intelligence sources. But the main rationale was the following: Capital flight is capital flight. We can no more help Russia retrieve such money than we can help Brazil or Argentina. If they get the economic fundamentals right, the money will return. I can not remember whether anybody put it so explicitly, but the implication was clear: It doesn't matter who has the money or how it was acquired, even if by theft; so long as it is private, it will return to do good things if there is a market. About a year later, my retired colleague updated me on subsequent developments. On its own, his company located substantial funds expatriated by the KGB. It informed its client and suggested approaches for recovering the funds. By that time, however, the Russian government no longer seemed interested. Obviously, top officials and organizations had found ways to access the funds that did not require, indeed would be disrupted by, official efforts to repatriate them. When some while later I read an interview in which Pavel Borodin, the long-time quartermaster of Yeltsin's 10 The most extensive analysis of this widely reported phenomenon I have found in an unpublished manuscript by Richard Palmer in collaboration with Vladimir Brovkin, The New Russian Oligarchy: The Nomenklatura, the KGB, and the Mafiya [check spelling]. It contains unique documentation of high-level CPSU sponsorship of this operation as well as new details about its execution in the field. Kremlin, proudly reported that he managed several hundred private companies to bring in off-budget revenues, I had a feeling I knew where he got his start-up capital. I also felt I knew more about the suicide of Central Committee money handler Nikolai Kruchina after the aborted August 1991 coup. He obviously feared the most severe punishment at the hands of the post-communist regime. This tale conveys several lessons: The great Russian rip-off began not under Yeltsin but under Gorbachev. It set the course for what accelerated after him. This should put into perspective the clamor of Russia's communists about corrupt reformers and comprador capitalists: Are they outraged by the crimes committed by their former (and some present) associates, or by their failure to get a share of the loot? It should also give pause to those who pine for the lost opportunities of perestroika. While Gorbachev pondered the "500 Day Plan", his minions were already plundering Russia. When the KGB was energetically moving money west and south, Primakov was a very influential advisor to Gorbachev on security and intelligence affairs, and Maslyukov was head of Gosplan. Did they not know what was going on? Later heading the SVR11, Primakov inherited control over the funds. Yet, reportedly, he urged closing down the Supreme Soviet investigation into what happened to them. It would now be a nice gesture, at least, to include a fresh look into this matter among the current Russian government's anti-corruption measures. Washington's part in purveying in Russia the dogma that markets will triumph over all, that the ownership and source of wealth matter not so long as it is (or seems) private, began not in the Clinton administration but under President Bush. I confess some chagrin for not making more of a fuss at the time. If the KGB's theft of Russia's money in 1985-91 was capital flight, then so was the smuggling of Nazi gold in 1945. The crime spree that began under Gorbachev and the dogmas about Russian economic reform that began in Washington under Bush had a similar fate: they both escalated to do more damage under their successors. The burden of the foregoing is that American intelligence analysts and policymakers should have known about the Russian crime and corruption problem as a threat to reform and as a challenge to our grasp of Russian realities. Indeed, a fine analysis was done by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research in April 1992. But subsequently, neither American intelligence analysis nor American policymakers adequately appreciated the crime and corruption problem. Why was this? One source of trouble was what we call "politicization", the warping of intelligence analysis to fit political agendas. James Risen's New York Times' article alluded to above charged that the Clinton administration's Russia hands did not want to hear about Russian crime and corruption, especially that involving top figures, because this whole theme would complicate on-going policies and tarnish the images of those Russian and American officials who were partners in reform and a new strategic relationship. Risen's article cites unnamed policymaking officials as objecting that reporting about the corruption of high Russian figures was vague; it contained no "smoking gun"; and it was felt to imply that the United States should not deal with reportedly tainted figures. These objections constitute, in my judgment, admission to the charge, affirming that policymakers did resist this information and seeking to explain why they thought they should. But such rebuttals were and are entirely beside the point. This analysis aimed not to support prosecution of, or estrangement from, the foreign officials being analyzed, but to inform American decisionmaking about their interests and the context in which they had to operate. The recipients evidently did not want to hear this. Their disdain for analysis about corruption of Russian politics and their Russian partners did, indeed, have a chilling effect on treatment of these topics, especially during the critical years 1993-96. Friends in the foreign service tell me that the same syndrome crimped reporting, especially on economic reform, by our embassy in Moscow. But there were other culprits than "customer sales resistance" at work. Intelligence analysis brought its own vulnerabilities to the table, first, in the form of a post-Cold War agenda that has become ever more operational (i.e., supportive of daily business) rather than focusing on understanding the big picture; and second, a management code that prizes above all serving-which can easily degenerate into pleasing-the customer. Our policymakers did not much want, and our intelligence analysts had little incentive to provide, a big-picture, long-term assessment of Russian realities. They mainly wanted to get through the next Gore-Chernomyrdin meeting, or the next quarrel about Russian missile dealings with Iran. Another difficulty was the tendency of a large bureaucracy to pigeon-hole a topic with many aspects into one, typically turf-conscious, organization. Needed, but lacking, was a multifaceted team effort bringing together perspectives on Kremlin politics, Russian business, privatization, banking, economic reform, intelligence, foreign relations and weapons proliferation. Meanwhile, the downtown customer community was fragmented by differing agendas, such as managing our diplomacy with Moscow, supporting economic reform, stopping proliferation, and thwarting international organized crime. The challenge to intelligence posed by Russian crime and corruption was in these respects similar to other topics on the post-Cold War agenda, such as weapons proliferation. Essentially: quote:
The burden of the foregoing is that American intelligence analysts and policymakers should have known about the Russian crime and corruption problem as a threat to reform and as a challenge to our grasp of Russian realities. ... But subsequently, neither American intelligence analysis nor American policymakers adequately appreciated the crime and corruption problem. Why was this? One source of trouble was what we call "politicization", the warping of intelligence analysis to fit political agendas. James Risen's New York Times' article alluded to above charged that the Clinton administration's Russia hands did not want to hear about Russian crime and corruption, especially that involving top figures, because this whole theme would complicate on-going policies and tarnish the images of those Russian and American officials who were partners in reform and a new strategic relationship. So what do we have as an explanation of why the USA stood quiet beside the largest of material crimes and looting ever? It was the US´s sacrifice for "politicization" in order to not endanger reforms and "strategic relationships". ... Which consequently ought to have been worth more than the trillions value of embezzlements. Letting aside ethics concerning the Russian population; - or what did you expect historically. What havn´t we seen of US vehement operations and policies in the past 6 decades alone for much less of resource than that? Such unflinching bulldozering internationally and nationally, during unroling of the USR however rested meek for some woolly appeasement projection? [8|] Look at the common ****. What "reform" has there been partnered on except of Russian people´s expropriation, mafia installation and establishing of caste society? What "strategic relationship" must we have been missing out on other than covering of pecuniary benefits on the American side? I am sure that who is interested after some clicks through broadband can find names and numbers on the looting, but demanding proof as if US envolvement in the clearing away would be exceptional of US industry and leadership proceeding, that is stiff as poker tiring method. Informed on past decades it would be only self-evident and simply unreal for US strategics partnered in the USSR to have been dissolving without in exchange for assistance ensuring own shares. BTW, have you never wondered how the western allied intelligence never even attempted to detect nazi´s enormous undercover depots abroad ( of which fled underground nazis and their offspring fed on so well)? Do you really believe that it would have been impossible to resurrect these funds and channel them back to a reconstructing Germany? ... What be the basic difference to a Marshall Plan, you say? Well, the essential that marks official policy. Which is: Spendings through states budgets, earnings into private accounts. That is besides why you can hardly talk of nationalities when it is about international affairs. For, individual strategies depend on ways of spendings and earnigs in respective official and private regard, which again makes national pinpointing moot more often than not. Cheers, Ruphus
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