Foreign Policy Vexations
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Foreign Policy Vexations BOSNIA ... spy scandal ... Hebron. As if Whitewater were not enough to divert President Clinton's attention from domestic renewal,...
...Howard was exposed to the CIA by a KGB defector, Vi-taly Yurchenko...
...Soon it may be time to speak of a new phase of relations with Russia called "the Cool War...
...But the issue of armed Jewish settlements on the West Bank, backstaged in September's Declaration of Principles on Palestinian Self-Rule, has now moved front and center...
...Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed 40 years ago for transferring nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviets in the hope that this would help to preserve peace...
...With the Bosnian Serbs emboldened by Russian support, the shooting down of four of their airplanes on a bombing run made in defiance of "no fly" zone restrictions further exacerbated the tension...
...While he testified that he did it to provide information crucial for Israel's survival, there was evidence that he received $2,500 a month, a secret bank account of $300,000, and even a $7,000 ring for his wife...
...It was the investigation started after Howard's escape that ultimately led to Ames, also a Soviet affairs specialist...
...Vice President Al Gore sought to play down the spy episode as something "whose origins are in the past...
...This will undoubtedly intensify pressure on Yeltsin to toe a nationalist line...
...The massacre on February 25 in the mosque in Hebron brought home what Palestinian and Israeli alike had feared since the famous Rabin-Arafat handshake at the White House last September —that the peace process would be put in jeopardy by extremist violence from one side, the other, or both...
...Meanwhile, the Russians (and the French) were pushing their proposal to internationalize Sarajevo under United Nations auspices...
...To advance these efforts, the U.S...
...The Russians, with a tit-for-tat expulsion of an American in Moscow, again hardly contributed to easing matters...
...He was thus in a position to warn his Soviet handlers of the peril to Howard and perhaps help Howard elude arrest and flee the country...
...Edward Lee Howard, the former Soviet desk officer at the CIA who sold intelligence information to the KGB, then managed to elude FBI surveillance and defect to the Soviet Union, had a Master's degree in business administration...
...High Stakes By a curious coincidence the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, were bracketed between the cessation of shelling in Sarajevo and the massacre in Hebron...
...But when I asked him whether he was suggesting Yeltsin was out of the loop, Talbott said he would not speculate about that...
...It declined to recall an intelligence officer from its Washington embassy "voluntarily" forcing the Administration to order his expulsion...
...John A. Walker Jr., a retired Navy warrant officer, was convicted along with his son, brother and another Navy retiree of selling Navy secrets to the Russians—originally, John Walker's wife testified, to bail out a bankrupt restaurant...
...During a lie-detector test, he admitted using alcohol and drugs and stealing money not only from vending machines but once from a woman's purse aboard an airliner...
...The Cool War While Clinton's spin doctors were trying to praise Russia for its "cooperation" in sending Russian troops to Bosnia and assisting in persuading the Bosnian Serbs to bow to the nato ultimatum for pulling back their artillery, the Russians were putting a totally different spin on their involvement...
...The Russian government, reacting as though the public disclosure rather than the fact of espionage were the provocation, did little to help Clinton gloss over the episode...
...In 1994 we must put an end to the faulty practice of unilateral concessions," Yeltsin said...
...East-West "partnership" was moving perilously close to an old-style tug of war...
...Jonathan Pollard, a civilian employee of the Naval Intelligence Service, was convicted of spying for Israel...
...Also, in times days sportsmanship was esteemed as much as winning...
...invited the negotiators to Washington...
...In fact, the Administration was following a conventional fiction that oils the wheels of diplomacy: Intelligence services function out of control of governments...
...They were saying they had come to the aid of their Serbian cousins and, in so doing, had averted nato air strikes that could have plunged Europe into general war...
...Alger Hiss, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were all motivated mainly by Communist sympathies...
...The Administration went to great pains to keep the Ames case from damaging the policy of befriending Boris N. Yeltsin's regime in Russia...
...A Muslim-Croat combination would provide an outlet to the sea and otherwise promise greater territorial viability than a rump Muslim enclave—especially if that enclave was not contiguous...
...Three days before Hebron, the spy case broke suddenly on the capital with the arrest of Aldrich Hazen Ames, career counterintelligence officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, and his wife Rosario...
...As if Whitewater were not enough to divert President Clinton's attention from domestic renewal, his international vexations have kept piling on in dizzying succession...
...exerted its influence with the Bosnian Muslims and Germany did the same with the Croats to bring the two groups together in a Western-oriented confederation...
...The 1980s were the "get mine" decade for baby-boomers on Wall Street, in business, sports, and the professions...
...And the top prize was an olive branch, plus a chance to be honored in song and in a marble bust—the media of the day...
...But no ancient Olympic truce will preserve Bosnia in anything like its original borders...
...That would help to frustrate Western efforts to get what remains of Bosnia on its feet...
...President Clinton stressed that aid to the Russians was in America's interest and went to many outside the government...
...President Clinton invited the wounded autonomy negotiations to Washington for intensive care...
...But not the class of '85...
...In my memory, only one leader ever acknowledged responsibility for a failed intelligence operation...
...That resulted in Nikita S. Khrushchev's storming out of the Paris summit convened days afterward...
...Speed records vie with record sums for commercial endorsements...
...Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said, dis-missively, that the "Russian secret services are conducting their clandestine business as though the Cold War never ended...
...They had another connection...
...And with record TV ratings: Although CBS long resisted delaying the reporting of election exit polls because news should not be withheld, it had no problem holding out Olympic coverage from the evening news until its more remunerative delayed prime time spectaculars of the day's events were aired...
...Ames, as a counterintelligence officer, participated in the debriefing of Yurchenko...
...They included Yeltsin's two principal opponents—Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, speaker of the dismissed former Parliament, and former Vice President Aleksandr V. Rut-skoi...
...President Dwight D. Eisenhower took the rap in 1960 for the downed U-2 spy flight over the Soviet Union...
...It almost seemed that fate had intervened to avoid our being distracted from the more popular drama of the rivalry between figure skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding—which reached its wonderful anticlimax when 16-year-old Ukrainian orphan Oksana Baiul walked (or skated) away with the gold...
...As the Russians behaved like patrons of the Serbs, the U.S...
...For the Administration all this could not have happened at a worse time, since support of reform in Russia was already strained by tension over Bosnia...
...Ames is said to have served the KGB and its post-Soviet successor, the SVRR, since 1985, received approximately $2.5 million in payment, compromised agency secrets, and fingered at least 10 Russian agents for the CIA who were subsequently executed...
...Because of the number of Americans exposed in 1985 as spying for money, it is already famous in the annals of espionage as "The Year of the Spy...
...This was a minimal gesture designed to defuse some of the mount-ing indignation in Congress...
...During the Cold War the United States was periodically rocked by the revelation of someone who had betrayed secrets out of ideological commitment...
...The truce was intended to make sure that no contestant would be molested on his way from distant colonies...
...Whether, and how soon, a seriously weakened PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat would be able to press on, as he manifestly wanted to do, was far from clear...
...The friendship games can no longer shut out an unfriendly world...
...On top of this, President Yeltsin on February 24 made his long-delayed first annual address to a joint session of Parliament...
...He promised more Bosnia-like initiatives and declared that "a strong Russia" would guarantee "stability on the entire territory of the former Soviet Union...
...I would not venture to say in the light of the early violent reactions to the shocking event...
...Did fate intervene to bring back the sacred Olympic truce that Greece enforced throughout its empire back in the 6th century BCE, when the world and the Olympic Games were young...
...There was a whiff of Cold War, too, in the alignment that seemed to be developing in Bosnia...
...Ronald Pelton, a communications specialist for the National Security Agency, was convicted of selling such secrets as the location of United States submarine wiretaps in Soviet harbors...
...Then, under an amnesty resolution passed by the recently elected Parliament, leading hard-liners who participated in the bloody confrontation in Moscow last October were released from prison...
...Has the peace process already developed enough momentum to be considered irreversible...
...Please stop fighting, please stop killing," pleaded Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, as he opened the Games with nine athletes from Bosnia-Herzegovina marching in the Parade of Nations...
...Titled "Strengthening the State of Russia," it was an assertive speech which, in its foreign policy section, placed the West on notice that Russia would not be a very compliant partner in the future...
...In a sense, mainstream Palestinians and Israelis are joined against the fanatics in the two camps seeking to frustrate any agreement before it becomes an accomplished fact...
...The Olympic story has become, at least in part, a story of speed and greed, of grace and disgrace...
...So, if greed was to be the highest loyalty, why not for spies as well...
...What a commentary on the "me generation"—ready to reap profit at the expense of customers, investors, friends, and in the end, at the expense of the country...
...The stakes are too high, the pressures too great...
...There was a whiff of Cold War in the suggestion that Moscow headed the peace camp and Washington was the capital of the warmongers...
...Nor will it insure civility among today's contestants for its soil...
Vol. 77 • February 1994 • No. 2
