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==================================================================
The BIRCH BARK BBS / 414-242-5070
==================================================================
THE NEW AMERICAN -- May 27, 1996
Copyright 1996 -- American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated
P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54913
==================================================================
ARTICLE: Front Page
TITLE: Russia's Global Crime Cartel
SUBTITLE: Dirty cops in the former Soviet Union run both sides of
the law
AUTHOR: William Norman Grigg
==================================================================
"Absent justice," wrote Augustine nearly 16 centuries ago, "what
are kingdoms but vast robberies?" History provides no better
example of the "robbers' state" than the Soviet Union, and this
remains tragically true of "post-Soviet" Russia under the rule of
Boris Yeltsin.
During his recent visit to Moscow, President Clinton renewed his
commitment to a "strategic partnership" with Russia to protect
Yeltsin's "reforms" and contain the threat posed by international
terrorism and organized crime. These themes had been examined at
length in an April 1st speech to the U.S.-Russian Business Council
in Washington, DC by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who
urged continued support for foreign aid to Russia. "A stable,
democratic-oriented, market-oriented Russia will be far less likely
to threaten America's security and far more likely to work with us
to solve global problems" such as "the growth of international
crime," Lake declared.
Lake boasted that "today, with America's strong support, more than
20,000 large enterprises and 100,000 small ones have been
transferred to private hands. Now the private sector produces more
than 60 percent of Russia's GDP." What neither the Clinton
Administration nor the Yeltsin regime will admit, however, is that
nearly all of the "privatized" enterprises remain securely in the
control of the Communist Party and the KGB, and that joint
U.S.-Russian efforts to fight "organized crime" have had the effect
of preserving the communist oligarchy's control over Russian
society.
Crime Fighters Converge
On July 4, 1994, FBI Director Louis Freeh and then-Russian Interior
Minister Viktor Yerin signed a protocol providing for joint law
enforcement efforts. After opening an FBI attache office in Moscow
and a tour which included a visit to the KGB's notorious Lubyanka
Square headquarters, Freeh exulted, "We can honestly say that our
two nations have more in common than ever before...." Sergei
Stepashin, who heads the Federal Security Service (FSB, successor
to the KGB), celebrated the pact by declaring, "Together, we're
invincible."
Just as U.S.-Russian military cooperation is to be the foundation
of UN-mandated "peacekeeping" missions in the new world order, the
FBI's alliance with the FSB and the Russian Interior Ministry (MVD)
is intended to be the basis for a new global order in law
enforcement. Writing in the spring 1995 issue of International
Affairs, the journal of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Viktor Yerin
explained: "Russia fully supports the concrete and substantive
steps [taken by the UN] to promote interaction between its members
in fighting crime." Yerin recommended that the UN conduct "a
codified review of national legislation and practice in this field
[in order] to harmonize as far as possible the approach of
countries to the fight against organized crime and ensure on this
basis the inevitable punishment of persons involved in this
activity irrespective of the place and country where they may have
committed their crimes."
The Russian regime and the Clinton Administration are already
acting in complete harmony in this regard. In testimony before the
Senate Judiciary Committee on April 27, 1995, Ronald Noble, the
Clinton Administration's Undersecretary of the Treasury for
Enforcement, declared:
"With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the end of its
centralized control over nuclear materials and associated
technologies, we anticipate increased terrorist problems. Weapons
procurement networks are becoming more advanced and clandestine. To
combat these problems, Treasury, through the U.S. Customs Service,
is increasing its liaison with the U.S. intelligence community and
foreign customs and other law enforcement agencies, PARTICULARLY IN
EASTERN EUROPE AND THE FORMER SOVIET UNION." [Emphasis added.]
President Clinton touched upon the same developments in a speech to
the United Nations General Assembly last October, calling for "an
effective police partnership" at the global level to combat "the
increasingly interconnected groups that traffic in terror,
organized crime, drug smuggling, and the spread of weapons of mass
destruction." In February, CIA and FBI agents stationed in Europe
conducted a closed-door meeting at the U.S. embassy in Rome to
continue work on the proposed global police partnership. According
to the Washington Post, the Rome meeting was held to coordinate
efforts to deal with the "post-Cold War threats" of "global
organized crime, terrorism and international narcotics
trafficking." The Post described the Rome meeting as part of a
continuing effort "to iron out new, post-Cold War relationships to
fight crime rather than communism."
One remarkable result of the "post-Cold War" struggle against
international organized crime is the essential re-establishment of
the Soviet Union's Cold War boundaries. On April 12th, a summit of
representatives from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS),
which includes all of the "ex"-Soviet Republics except for the
Baltic states, approved a "Plan for Integrated Development of the
Commonwealth" which envisions the essential restoration of the
Soviet Union. The document calls for the re-establishment of a
shared defense policy, common currency, and political integration.
According to Reuters, this Soviet restoration is inspired, in large
measure, by the need "to form a common front against organized
crime."
"Organized crime," according to Senator John Kerry (D-MA), "is the
new communism, the new monolithic threat." Actually, to a
significant extent, organized crime in Russia and the former Soviet
empire is the old communism, and its influence is being used to
advance the traditional strategic objectives pursued by Soviet
communism: Subversion of the West, enrichment of the party and the
Russian military-industrial complex through Western foreign aid,
and eventual convergence with the U.S. on terms favorable to world
socialism.
"Mafiya" Threat
Since the "collapse" of the Soviet Union in 1991, oceans of ink
have been poured into press coverage of the Russian Mafiya, and the
subject has become a staple of Hollywood action fare. In his book
Comrade Criminal: Russia's New Mafiya, foreign correspondent
Stephen Handleman describes the penetration of the Russian mob into
western Europe and even the United States in recent years. "A
sinister new figure [has] suddenly appeared on the police blotters
of Western countries," Handleman warns, "the post-Communist
gangster."
However, there is nothing novel about the activities or ambitions
of the Russian mob. In an April 1994 interview published in the
International Herald Tribune, Georgian mafia leader Otari
Kvantrishvili boasted: "They write that I am the mafia's godfather.
It was Vladimir Lenin who was the real organizer of the mafia and
who set up the criminal state." In 1995, former Lithuanian Vice
President Algirdas Katkus stated that although "Westerners believe
that the mafia is the product of post-Communism ... in reality it
is organized, staffed, and controlled by the KGB."
These observations are confirmed by Yuri Maltsev, a former senior
adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, who told THE NEW AMERICAN that
"Russia has become the criminal capital of the world. In Russia
today, the organized mafia and the government are one and the same
thing. They're two hands of the same ruling elite." This state of
affairs began with the founding of the Soviet state. "