Washington Notebook
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR What a Difference a Year Makes! The start of 1993 caused me to temper the expansive global view I expressed at the start of 1992. Then 1 was...
...Indeed, the idea of a quick "feed-'emand-leave-'em" operation in Somalia was proving to have been a delusion from the start...
...A relationship developed that consisted of our discussing life in Russia and America, but sometimes he would drop in unannounced to tell me something marginally interesting that had not been in the Soviet press...
...No wonder Bush worked on having "Historic Treaty" headlines replace those "Iran-Contra Pardon" headlines...
...withdraw temporarily under the terms of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution...
...It is interesting to go back to the day before Christmas, when the President made two important telephone calls from Camp David...
...The KGB's Dirty Tricks The following reflections are occasioned by an article in Time magazine reporting that Dusko Doder, former Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, was identified in 1985 by Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB defector (who later redefected), as having accepted a $1,000 payment from the Soviet intelligence agency...
...On occasion he would silently beckon me to join him on the street to offer some information that he did not want overheard by KGB microphones...
...What a difference a year makes...
...In any event, Administration officials had assumed that the treaty would be signed on American soil, probably in Anchorage, Alaska...
...Word has been leaked that Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger would meet Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev in Geneva the following Monday to finish up the treaty...
...One, at 9:30 a.m., was to the White House conveying his decision to pardon former Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger and five other Iran-contra defendants...
...Ford said that Haig outlined five options, and presented what he professed to be a legal memorandum in support of them: Nixon could tough it out to impeachment...
...Well, the Constitution precludes him only from using the pardon to avoid impeachment—suggesting that he is answerable to Congress, but not necessarily to the courts...
...But Bush, whose voice choked up when he described the humanitarian military effort to West Point cadets, seemed to have no regrets about leaving responsibility for the deployment on his successor's doorstep...
...Yurchenko said fellow officers had told him Doder was a KGB contact...
...A UN Transitional Authority was guiding traumatized Cambodia toward elections...
...Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh has accused him of "misconduct" for withholding until last month a diary he started as Vice President in November 1986, when the arms deliveries to both Iran and the Nicaraguan contras broke into public view...
...pardon himself and all the Watergate defendants before resigning...
...Then 1 was spotting a trend toward the emergence of the United Nations into its full peacemaking, peacekeeping glory...
...Stone, Alger Hiss—we should not allow ourselves to be manipulated by defectors and alumni of the murky world of Communist intelligence...
...I am sure Victor made generous contributions to my KGB dossier...
...White House sources said for five days that they had not heard about Sochi and were inclined to discount it...
...Since there seems to be no doubt that a former President, or Vice President, can be held legally accountable for his actions in office, if Bush wanted to ring down the curtain on the Iran-contra prosecution with absolute finality there is one more person he would have had to pardon—himself...
...If there is anything we should have learned from the Cold War, it is that whatever the subject—Dusko Doder, I.F...
...Doder became the subject of a warning to the Washington Post in 1986 by then FBI Director William H. Webster...
...The other was to President Yeltsin, urging a crash effort to complete the start II treaty within a week so that Bush could sign it on the way from Somalia...
...The Russians were allowed to convert a number of their silos for giant SS-18 missiles into housing for smaller ones...
...When Yeltsin then stated in China that he was ready to sign the treaty, the White House reaction was, in effect, "no way"—a lot of work still had to be done...
...Now Doder, who free-lances from Belgrade, is haunted by a two-page spread in Time magazine that makes clear nothing was ever proved against him, yet leaves him under a cloud of innuendo and suspicion...
...Who knows what flamboyant claims he made about how he had be friended me...
...So the likelihood is that the Irancontra investigation will pursue him...
...Unless there is a Ford in his future—a successor who wants to heal the nation and concludes that Bush has suffered enough...
...Only a week earlier, in Stockholm, Eagleburger and Kozyrev had been unable to resolve their final differences...
...The fifth option was the only one that required the Vice President's concurrence...
...It was, of course, what happened...
...pardon himself alone and resign...
...Luckily for my reputation in the United States, the KGB found me generally undesirable, had me briefly arrested on a trumped up charge, and ultimately barred me from the Soviet Union...
...In Geneva, Kozyrev, aware of Eagleburger's quick-time marching orders, sardonically offered to bet a bottle of whiskey that they would finish the treaty within 24 hours...
...And a new Third World Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, was looking to the day when an international force, free of colonial taint, would be on call to douse eruptions around the world...
...or resign and be pardoned by his successor...
...He lost, of course...
...In Mogadishu, the contrast of jeers for Boutros-Ghali with cheers two days earlier for President George Bush made clear that the Somalis did not want American forces replaced by UN forces...
...As part-time correspondent for the London Evening News, he had a world scoop on the ouster of Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1964...
...Then a government bureau assigned as my translator a young man named Victor Louis, who told me he had spent five years in a prison camp...
...What this meant was that, on the telephone, Bush had assured Yeltsin the remaining points of contention would be swept away—as, to be sure, they were...
...In fact, selfpardon was one of the options being studied by President Richard M. Nixon's aides prior to his resignation...
...Eagleburger, aware that he had to maintain a facade of hard bargaining, accepted the bet...
...In Sarajevo, Boutros-Ghali found himself being jeered because his insistence on giving peace negotiations another chance was viewed by the Bosnians as a hindrance to U.S...
...As for the Iran-contra affair, it appears that private citizen Bush will be called to testify...
...One would have thought that lesson had been learned from the way the CIA's intelligence gathering in the Soviet Union was paralyzed for years by the mole hunt relentlessly pursued by Counter-intelligence Chief James J. Angleton under the influence of KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn...
...He appeared happy now to be going out, not with a whimper, but with a bang...
...Does a President have the power to pardon himself...
...as a generalized symbol of grievance...
...Another Time count against Doder was his suspicious scoops, including his scooping a red-faced CIA on the death in 1984 of Soviet Party chief Yuri V. Andropov...
...But all that was forgotten by the time the American and Russian Presidents met in the Kremlin on the first Sunday in 1993 and made speeches in which "historic" seemed to occur about every third word...
...At the dawn of 1993 the UN was having difficulty exerting its influence from no man's land in Lebanon, where extremist Palestinians expelled from Israel were huddled, to Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge was being retractable again...
...A big-power consensus in the Security Council had laid the groundwork for war with Iraq and subsequent protection of its minorities...
...A formula also was found to permit Russian inspection of nuclear missiles on American bombers while masking some secret devices...
...And who knows what some defector might one day tell the CIA about my KGB "connections...
...As I write there is no reason to believe President Bush gave any thought to a self-pardon before leaving the White House...
...A specific problem for Boutros-Ghali is that he is perceived as having tilted toward one warring faction in Somalia when he was the Foreign Minister of Egypt...
...Boutros-Ghali was the target of hostile demonstrations in Sarajevo, Mogadishu and Addis Ababa, the UN having, startlingly, replaced the U.S...
...No one who has ever worked amid the ambiguities of life in Moscow during the Cold War can react with equanimity to seeing a colleague stained from the KGB's bag of dirty tricks...
...The signing, Interfax said, would take place in Sochi, the Russian resort city on the Black Sea...
...During a rare Presidential appearance before a House Judiciary subcommittee, Gerald R. Ford revealed in October 1974 that White House Chief of Staff Alexander M. Haig discussed this with him in a one-on-one meeting the previous August 1, a week before Nixon's resignation...
...Departing Secretary General Perez de Cuellar had brokered the pullout of Soviet forces from Afghanistan...
...He produced a jar of caviar, suggested I order vodka and settled down for a conversation that began, "So, how is Bill Paley...
...military rescue...
...But it could have gone differently...
...The day I arrived in Moscow in September 1955 to open the CBS News bureau, a man knocked on my door in the Hotel National and identified himself as a Russian writer interested in meeting an American television correspondent...
...1 concluded that he was assigned by the KGB to keep tabs on me and was reporting heaven knows what about our conversations and my journalistic activities...
...The World Organization had redefined "threat to peace" to include human tragedy in countries like former Yugoslavia and Somalia...
...Mogadishu, along with Moscow, where he and Russia's Boris N. Yeltsin signed the start II treaty to reduce strategic nuclear warhead arsenals by approximately two-thirds, had done much to restore the spirits of a President depressed by his November election defeat...
...Within hours of the second call the Russian Interfax news agency was able to startle Americans—including most American officials...
...Victor, who died only last July, subsequently became very famous and very rich because of a KGB relationship that made him a privileged source of information...
Vol. 76 • January 1993 • No. 1
