From top to bottom: A rogue’s gallery of world leaders now on the wrong side of the law | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Boston Globe Sunday Focus on December 17, 1995

 

In the wake of the Cold War, a legion of Free World leaders has been marching to a different drummer: a federal prosecutor.

            Among the more notorious cases, Italy’s former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti is on trial for serving the Mafia, and will soon face charges he ordered the gangland murder of a journalist.

            But Andreotti has plenty of company in this growing rogue’s gallery of one-time leaders. This fall, South Korea’s former president Roh Tae Woo admitted to extorting $650 million in corporate gifts. Then his predecessor Chun Doo Hwan was charged with pocketing the even more staggering figure of $2 billion – and was jailed for ordering the Army to open fire on a 1980 demonstration in Kwangju protesting his coup d’etat. The attack left hundreds of civilians dead. Roh Tae Woo, a four-star general at the time, is expected to be similarly charged.

            In Mexico, Raul Salinas – suspected of the murder of his brother-in-law, the governing party’s secretary general, last year – was linked earlier this month to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts discovered in a US drug-money laundering investigation. Former Mexican President Carlos Salinas, co-architect of the North American Free Trade Agreement, has been telling interviewers from his exile in Canada that he’s not his blood brother’s keeper.

            And that’s only the tip of an iceberg long obscured from the White House’s view by Washington’s tolerance for scoundrels, provided they were staunchly anticommunist scoundrels.

            Not that only rightists lack halos. In Spain, Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, a socialist, claims ignorance of the executions of 23 Basque separatists and supporters between 1983 and 1987 by a death squad run by his now-jailed director of state security. (Fingers are pointing to the Basque underground group E.T.A. following a recent car-bombing that left six dead at a Spanish naval base.) And leaders of Ethiopia’s former Marxist military dictatorship are on trial in Addis Ababa before an unprecedented internal tribunal for crimes against humanity during the 17-year Mengistu regime, ousted in 1991.

            International tribunals are in store for the ringleaders of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzogovina and Rwanda, and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating state-ordered atrocities in South Africa during apartheid.

            But what should perhaps be of keenest interest to Americans are crimes committed by our close allies in the Cold War and war on drugs.

            Andreotti, prime minister for seven terms, is a living monument to the marriage of convenience – officiated at Washington at the end of World War II – of Rome and the Sicilian underworld, a partnership designed to keep socialist and communist leaders of the wartime antifascist underground out of power in Rome. The Mafia delivered the Sicilian vote (and from 1945 to 1955, the bodies of 43 leftists) as long as Andreotti’s Christian Democratic Party kept Italian authorities off the Mafia’s back.

            But the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the 1992 assassinations of revered organized crime prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and full exposure of the country’s government by graft finally sapped Italian tolerance for the Christian Democrats – and with it, the party’s power to protect its underworld allies.

            For Andreotti, the beginning of the end was 1993 testimony by the driver for Mafia godfather Salvatore (Toto) Riina, that in 1988 he saw Andreotti kiss Riina on the cheek. The last straw came when former Mafia capo Gaetano Badalamenti (behind bars for masterminding the Palermo-New York heroin traffic known as the “Pizza Connection”) told an informer that Andreotti had ordered the 1980 murder of journalist Mino Pecorelli.

            At the time of the murder, Pecorelli was reportedly working on a story about the 1978 kidnapping by the Red Brigades of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. The Brigades eventually executed Moro, key exponent of the Christian Democrats’ “historic compromise” with the Communist Party, when Andreotti, then prime minister, refused to negotiate with left-wing terrorists.

            Andreotti goes on trial in February for Pecorelli’s murder.

            But it is in Colombia – where murder is the leading unnatural cause of death – that political assassinations are nearly as common as coffee beans. And human rights groups pin the lion’s share of blame on successive Washington-backed Bogota governments.

            The historical origins of Colombian violence are complex. However, experts generally cite the government’s 35-year war against leftist revolutionaries, and alliances between government’s antiguerrilla forces, paramilitary death squads and narcotics traffickers – alliances apparently unnoticed by Washington in its zeal to link the guerrillas to the traffickers.

            In October, Santiago Medina, former campaign treasurer for Colombian president Ernesto Samper, claimed that – with Samper’s blessing – he had received $6 million from the Cali drug cartel to finance Samper’s 1994 campaign. According to Medina, the donation was arranged at a meeting in Madrid between Samper and representatives of the cocaine and heroin cartel.

            Last month, a 1990 Colombian presidential candidate and former ambassador to Washington, Alvaro Gomez Hurtado, a staunch critic of government coziness with drug traffickers, was shot to death in broad daylight on a street in Bogota.

            True, the Colombian congress declined to press charges against Samper, but then again, that same congress just last week voted to release all officials convicted of accepting gifts from the drug cartel. And, further, prosecutors maintain that Samper’s campaign did indeed receive millions of dollars from the drug cartel.

            Like his predecessors, Samper has vowed to fight the narcotrafficantes and improve respect for human rights. However, according to a 1994 Amnesty International report on violence in Colombia, “Successive governments have largely escaped international criticism because of a skillful mix of political initiatives, public relations campaigns and the support … of powerful allies for whom Colombia’s strategic and economic significance is of far more importance than its human rights record.”

            Chief among those allies is the United States, which under Presidents Bush and Clinton has awarded Colombia $1 billion in military aid, largely tied to the drug war. However, according to investigative journalist Karl Bermann, most of the aid is channeled to counterinsurgency campaigns – where the majority of human rights violations occur.

            And the White House has blocked a United Nations resolution to create a criminal court for human rights cases by insisting the Security Council pre-screen cases, a condition that has effectively scuttled the resolution because it would give Washington veto power.

            Truer to the United States’ professed values, the White House and a budget-cutting Congress should instead take the hatchet to foreign assistance programs that benefit corrupt politicians and their parties – a policy whose last remaining, and ever dubious, rationale, the Cold War, ended five years ago.

 

Professor has a tough question for President | THE TUFTS DAILY | October 25, 1994

 To the Editor: 

I won‘t be attending former president Bush‘s talk, but I hope someone will ask him the following: 

In March 1988, you stated, ‘"I will never bargain with drug dealers on US or foreign soil. How then do you -- who granted fewer pardons and commutations than any other president this century (even counting your 11th hour pardons of former Defense Sec retary Casper Weinberger and the other Iran-Contra defendants) explain the execu tive clemency you granted the Pakistani Aslam P. Adam just two days before you packed your bags and left the White House? After all, although Mr. Adam had served only eight of the 55 years he was sentenced to for heroin trafficking. He would have been eligible for parole in 1995. Why have you refused to answer questions about this case?

Clinton’s foes may sense from him that they’re onto something big | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Boston Globe Sunday Focus on March 13, 1994

 

A key question surrounds the “Whitewater affair,” named for the Whitewater Development Corp., the ill-fated real estate partnership formed in 1978 between Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton and their Little Rock friends James and Susan McDougal: Are Sen. Bob Dole, Rep. Jim Leach and others merely dredging up a malodorous, yet innocuous, chapter from the distant past? Or are the Republicans—who under Nixon, Reagan and Bush wrote the book on the art of the coverup—onto something much bigger?

The Clintons’ disclaimers notwithstanding, their sensitivity to the issue suggests that there is more to Whitewater than meets the eye. What that may be is a matter for conjecture. There is certainly no shortage of possibilities. The administration’s clumsy handling of the apparent suicide in July of the deputy White House counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr. – Mrs. Clinton’s former law partner, and the Clintons’ personal lawyer – plus ill-advised meetings between the White House counsel and Treasury Department officials overseeing an investigation of the McDougal Clinton connection, suggest that a coverup is in fact under way.

But a coverup of what?

Hot in pursuit of an answer is Robert B. Fiske Jr., the special counsel the president grudgingly appointed in January to investigate Whitewater Development and its links to McDougal’s Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, which like so many other S&Ls, went belly up at the close of the ‘80s.

The Madison/Whitewater affair was messy, though maybe not by Arkansas standards. In 1978, James McDougal invited the Clintons (Bill was state attorney general) to join him and his wife, Susan, in developing vacation homes in the Ozarks at the 230-acre Whitewater Estates. The Clintons assumed 50 percent ownership, apparently without putting up money.

Soon thereafter, Clinton was elected governor and appointed his partner McDougal as an adviser. Four years later, McDougal took over Madison Guaranty. In the interim, Clinton had been defeated, made a comeback, and was back in the governor’s office.

During his 1984 bid for reelection, Clinton borrowed $50,000 for his campaign. He won a third term, then asked McDougal for help in repaying the loan. McDougal organized a fund-raiser, and collected $35,000. The special counsel is investigating whether some of that money came directly from McDougal’s bank. Meanwhile, Madison itself was showing signs of going under, which were noted by the Federal Home Loan Board. The bank’s fate was in the hands of the Arkansas Securities Department.

Fortunately for McDougal, Clinton replaced the state’s securities commissioner with Beverly Bassett, who earlier had done legal work for Madison. McDougal proposed a rescue plan involving the sale of the stock. Representing McDougal before Bassett was his business partner and friend, Hillary Clinton. Bassett approved McDougal’s plan after reviewing a favorable audit. Only later would an investigation reveal that the auditor had owed money to Madison.

In 1989, Madison was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which then sought a private lawyer to take charge of the settlement. Ignoring Mrs. Clinton’s and the governor’s close connection to McDougal, the FDIC assigned the task to Webster Hubbell, Mrs. Clinton’s partner at the prestigious Rose law firm in Little Rock. Hubbell now occupies the No. 3 post at the Justice Department, having been appointed by President Clinton.

The Clintons sold off their Whitewater investment after the presidential victory in 1992. They claim a $69,000 loss. However juicy the story may be, it illustrates little more than the way things are done in Arkansas, and predates the Clintons’ move into the White House. On the basis of it alone, one would conclude that the Republicans are making a mountain out of a molehill. Perhaps there is more to the Whitewater story. Ore are the Clintons afraid of opening the S&L Pandora’s box?

Consider the case of Thomas F. (Mack) McLarty 3d, Bill Clinton’s childhood friend from Hope, Ark., and now his chief of staff. As reported in The Nation magazine, in the seven years before his White House appointment, McLarty ran Arkla, a natural gas company. In 1987, Arkla bought out another gas company, Entex, which controlled University Federal Savings of Houston. In the golden decade of S&L deregulation, University’s assets had skyrocketed from $400 million to $4.5 billion.

According to a federal lawsuit filed by the Resolution Trust Corporation, which was created to clean up the S&L mess, University operated recklessly, making questionable loans to the tune of $300 million. The RTC sued Entex, University and Arkla to reclaim half a billion dollars to US taxpayers paid to cover University’s losses. The trial is set for this fall.

One University borrower was Lan Bentsen, son of Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen. Lan used unsecured loans totaling more than $5.6 million to purchase an apartment complex. University renewed the loan nine times in three years, even though Bentsen was late in making payments. He eventually stopped paying at all.

This might explain why Bill Clinton did not make an issue of the S&L debacle during his presidential battle with George Bush.

Then again, was it not also strange that Clinton steered clear of that other Bush vulnerable point, Iran-Contra? A possible explanation for that, and additional cause for the Clintons to be leery of a reexamination of their lives, is offered in a new sure-to-be-controversial book published by Shapolsky Publishers, Inc.

“Compromised,” by Terry Reed, a former Air Force pilot, and John Cummings, a veteran investigative reporter, alleges that at the height of the Reagan-Bush administration’s illegal operations against Nicaragua, and with Gov. Bill Clinton’s authorization, Arkansas provided the CIA a secret training and supply base for the Contras.

Reed, who claims to have played a role in these operations, allegedly learned that the CIA channeled millions in payoffs to the governor’s administration by way of affluent supporters of Clinton, including Dan Lasater. During this same period in the mid-‘80s, banker/bondsman Lasater employed Roger Clinton as a chauffeur. It was an unfortunate connection: The president’s brother was arrested for cocaine trafficking, turned state’s informant and cooperated with Arkansas police in a drug sting operation that nabbed Lasater.

As to the CIA payoff money, according to “Compromised,” it wound up in the coffers of the Arkansas Development Finance Authority. The ADFA was Clinton’s vehicle for promoting the state’s industrial growth—which he proudly pointed to during his ascent to Washington. Among the beneficiaries of ADFA largesse, according to the book, was a parking meter manufacturing company owned by Seth Ward. This is intriguing because Ward is the father-in-law of Webster Hubbell. And Ward reportedly defaulted on loans totaling $577,000 from Madison Guaranty. According to Reed and Cummings, CIA payoff money also was airdropped in bales onto a ranch owned by Ward and occupied by another son-in-law Finis Shellnut. During the 1992 election campaign, when Bill Clinton was slammed with stories of rumored extramarital affairs, People magazine reported that Shellnut was the boyfriend of Clinton’s alleged paramour, Gennifer Flowers.

“Compromised” is likely to be greeted with skepticism, controversy and a slew of libel suits. It surely will be pointed out that the alleged source of much of Reed’s information, Barry Seal, an operative of both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency, was murdered in 1996. But its publication, and the special counsel’s ongoing Whitewater investigation, will put to the test Clinton’s remarkable ability to survive assaults on his character.

 

Inman’s telling record of silence: The spymaster kept quiet at key times | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Boston Globe Sunday Focus, December 26, 1993

 

The good news about last week’s exposes about retired Adm. Bobby Ray Inman is we now know why he should not be secretary of defense. The bad news is the revelations are unlikely to derail President Clinton’s nomination of the former spymaster.

It is particularly bad because of the daunting challenges that await Les Aspin’s successor: hotspots in Haiti, the former Yugoslavia and Somalia; simmering confrontations in the Middle East; instability in the former Soviet Union; insidious linkage between Third World conflicts and Pentagon-sponsored arms sales; and pressure to shrink defense spending, which remains bloated despite the Cold War’s end.

Although Congressional leaders have been falling all over each other in the rush to endorse Inman, largely because of his great intellect, experience and forthright and cordial manner, after the Reagan/Bush era of illegal intelligence operations and Pentagon corruption, the national security apparatus needs someone to help clean house, and Inman’s tarnished record suggests he is not the one.

To his credit, in early 1976, while director of naval intelligence during the Carter administration, Inman fired rogue agent Edwin Wilson, a member of a top-secret task force that set up businesses worldwide as covers for intelligence operations, had amassed a personal fortune from the business fronts. Wilson now is serving a 52-year sentence for crimes committed after his dismissal, including supplying explosives to Libya.

In addition, Inman, while director of the National Security Agency in the late 1970s, did away with a policy of firing homosexuals.

Later, in March 1982, Inman resigned after 16 months as deputy director of the CIA. William Casey’s management style and several of the director’s policies, including plans for intelligence gathering in the United States, had gnawed at Inman. Casey, who died in 1986, is widely regarded as the mastermind of covert operations in support of the Nicaraguan contras and the arms-for-hostages deals with Iran.

While Inman’s resignation is regarded as another feather in his cap, the circumstances surrounding it are murky. At a press briefing two weeks earlier, Inman had presented aerial photographs to establish that Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista-government was in the midst of a big military buildup. The photos purportedly demonstrated the lengthening of runways to accommodate Soviet MIG fighters – thus supporting Reagan administration claims that Nicaragua was becoming a base for Soviet penetration of this hemisphere, starting with nearby El Salvador, where the White House was embracing a brutal, right-wing, military-dominated government in a civil war.

The briefing was part of an elaborate Reagan administration p.r. effort for its bankrolling of the contras’ guerrilla war against the Nicaraguan government. CIA analysts later concluded that the Soviets were not going to send MIGs to Central America. But to avoid embarrassing Inman, Casey and the agency, the conclusion was suppressed by Casey’s top assistant, Robert Gates. Inman would later repay the favor.

Five years later, President Reagan nominated Gates to head the CIA, but Gates withdrew because he was tainted with the fresh stench of Iran-contra. When President Bush nominated him again in 1991, Gates was slammed with new charges that he had suppressed intelligence reports unfavorable to Reagan’s and Bush’s policies, and that he had played an important role in the Bush administration’s coddling of Saddam Hussein in the years before the Gulf War.

But Gates was confirmed by a timid Congress, because the truth about the White House support for Iraq, both during its eight-year war with Iran until 1988 and afterward, has emerged only in dribs and drabs over the last two years. And Inman spoke out in Gates’ support. Inman could be expected to sympathize with his fellow spook, since his closet contained several skeletons of his own.

After resigning from the CIA in 1982, Inman served as a consultant to the House Intelligence Committee during a particularly sensitive period. Congressional authorization of military aid to El Salvador had been made contingent upon improvement in the Salvador armed forces’ respect for civil rights, and the committee was investigating reports that US-trained troops had massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote.

The House committee issued a report blasting the State Department for a lackadaisical investigation. (State found no evidence of a massacre.) Inman then resigned as the Committee’s consultant and, according to a report last week in The New York Times, told a group of retired intelligence officers he had not been consulted on the report, which he characterized as deeply flawed.

Ten years later, after locating hundreds of skeletal remains, mostly of women and children, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador confirmed the massacre in El Mozote.

Inman’s spat with the Intelligence Committee may have been simply a difference of opinion. Much more sinister is his connection to James Guerin, a former electronics and arms manufacturer now serving a 15-year federal sentence for a $1 billion fraud and transfer of military technology to South Africa and Iraq.

In the mid to late ‘70s, Inman served successively as director of naval intelligence, vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and director of the NSA. According to “Spider’s Web” by Alan Friedman, a reporter for the Financial Times during that period, Inman’s spy agencies encouraged Guerin’s company, International Signal and Control, based in Lancaster, Pa., to ship advanced electronic sensors, optics and related military equipment to South Africa, despite a UN embargo that Washington officially respected. The justification: The equipment was to be used to monitor Soviet shipping traffic off the Cape of Good Hope.

When Inman left the CIA, he became a paid member of International Signal and Control’s proxy board of directors. Since ISC was a Pentagon contractor, and its stock was controlled by British investors, US law required such a board to guarantee the security of classified information.

Among the contracts the board authorized was one in 1983 to manufacture cluster bombs, a particularly lethal form of land-clearing weaponry whose export is normally tightly controlled. With the tacit approval of Inman’s proxy board and Reagan administration intelligence officials, the cluster bombs eventually wound up in the hands of Saddam Hussein’s forces.

According to Friedman’s careful reconstruction of events, ISC in 1984 entered into a cooperative agreement with Chilean arms manufacturer Carlos Cardoen to divide the global cluster bomb market and to teach Cardoen’s people how to improve their own bombs. Cardoen, in turn, became Iraq’s cluster bomb supplier. This required Washington to waive secretly its restrictions on the export of cluster bomb technology, its embargo on arms shipments to the Chile of dictator Augusto Pinochet, and its official neutrality in the Iran-Iraq war. Inman kept his mouth shut.

And that – not his failure to pay his housekeeper’s Social Security tax or his dismal record as a top executive with several defense contractors in the last 10 years – is why Inman should not be put in charge of the Pentagon.