Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship

Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship

by Ken Silverstein
Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship

Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship

by Ken Silverstein

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Overview

“As I have often said, I would represent the devil himself for the right price–it’s not personal, just business.”
–a Washington, D.C., lobbyist

For nearly as long as there have been politicians in the United States, there have been lobbyists haunting the halls of Congress–shaking hands, bearing gifts, and brandishing agendas. Everyone knows how the back-scratching game of money, power, and PR is played. For a good enough offer, there are those who will gladly dive into the dirtiest political waters. The real question is: Just how low will they sink? Veteran investigative journalist Ken Silverstein made it his mission to find out–and “Turkmeniscam” was born.

On assignment for Harper’s magazine, and armed with a fistful of fake business cards, Silverstein went deep undercover as a corporate henchman with money to burn and a problem to solve: transforming the former Soviet-bloc nation Turkmenistan–branded “one of the worst totalitarian systems in the world”–into a Capitol Hill-friendly commodity. Even in the notoriously ethics-challenged world of Washington’s professional lobbying industry, could “Kenneth Case” (Silverstein’s fat-cat alter ego) find a team of D.C. spin doctors willing to whitewash the regime of a megalomaniac dictator with an unpronounceable name and an unspeakable reputation? Would the Beltway’s best and brightest image-mongers shill for a country condemned for its mind-boggling history of corruption, brutality, and civil rights abuse?

Who would dare tread in the ignoble footsteps of Ivy Lee, the pioneering PR guru who sought to make the Nazis look nice? And who would stoop to unprecedented new lows to conquer Congress and compromise the red, white, and blue for the sake of the almighty green? As Ken Silverstein discovers in this mordantly funny, disturbingly enlightening, jaw-dropping exploration of the dark side, the real question is: Who wouldn’t?


Praise for The Radioactive Boy Scout

“Alarming . . . The story fascinates from start to finish.”
–Outside

“An astounding story . . . [Silverstein] has a novelist’s eye for meaningful detail and a historian’s touch for context.”
–The San Diego Union-Tribune

“[Silverstein] does a fabulous job of letting David [Hahn’s] surrealistic story tell itself. . . . But what’s truly amazing is how far Hahn actually got in the construction of his crude nuclear reactor.”
–The Columbus Dispatch

“Enthralling . . . [The Radioactive Boy Scout] has the quirky pleasures of a Don DeLillo novel or an Errol Morris documentary. . . . An engaging portrait of a person whose life on America’s fringe also says something about mainstream America.”
–Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Amazing . . . unsettling . . . should come with a warning: Don’t buy [this book] for any obsessive kids in the family. It might give them ideas.”
–Rocky Mountain News

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781588367549
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 09/23/2008
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 224
File size: 368 KB

About the Author

Ken Silverstein is the author of The Radioactive Boy Scout. The Washington editor of Harper’s magazine, he is a former investigative reporter for the Washington, D.C., bureau of the Los Angeles Times. Silverstein has also written for Mother Jones, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among other publications. He lives in Washington.

Read an Excerpt

ONE
 
A Short History of Foreign Lobbying
 
When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the publication of the U.S. government’s annual survey of global human rights in March 2007, she said its release demonstrated America’s commitment to civil liberties, the rule of law, a free press, and security forces that protect their people instead of repressing them. “We are recommitting ourselves to stand with those courageous men and women who struggle for their freedom and their rights,” she stated. “And we are recommitting ourselves to call every government to account that still treats the basic rights of its citizens as options rather than, in President Bush’s words, the non-negotiable demands of human dignity.”
 
Yet when one flips through the pages of the report it quickly becomes apparent that many of the countries most severely criticized for human rights abuses had won from the Bush administration foreign aid, military assistance, and expanded trade opportunities. A number of leaders from these countries have also won coveted White House visits, and accompanying photo ops with Bush or other senior officials. The aura of legitimacy thus conferred can help ease doubts among American companies about investing in their homelands, as well as blunt criticism from domestic foes.
 
The granting of favorable concessions to dictatorial regimes is not a practice limited to the Bush administration, nor is it one restricted to Republican presidents. Bill Clinton came into office having said that China’s access to American markets should be tied to improved human rights—specifically its willingness to “recognize the legitimacy of those kids that were carrying the Statue of Liberty” at Tiananmen Square—and left having granted Beijing its long-cherished goal of Most Favored Nation (now called Permanent Normal Trade Relations) status. Jimmy Carter put the promotion of human rights at the heart of his foreign policy, yet he cut deals for South American generals and Persian Gulf monarchs in much the same fashion as his successor, Ronald Reagan.
 
How is it that year in and year out, come Republican or Democratic administration, the world’s worst regimes win favors in Washington? In part, because they often have something highly desired by the United States that can be leveraged to their advantage, be it oil (e.g., Saudi Arabia), vast markets for trade and investment (China), or geostrategic importance (Egypt). But even the most inherently well-endowed regimes need help gaming the Washington system, and it is their great fortune that countless lobbyists are, for the right price, invariably willing to lend a hand.
 
Lobbyists have been aiding and abetting pariah regimes since at least as far back as the 1930s, when the Nazi government, through a firm called the German Dye Trust, retained Ivy Lee, the father of modern public relations, to favorably influence American public opinion of the Third Reich.
 
Lee’s most famous domestic client was John D. Rockefeller, the industrialist and founder of Standard Oil who became the world’s richest man. Under Lee’s guidance, Time magazine reported in 1934 (in an article about Lee’s work for the Nazis), Rockefeller “was metamorphosed from a corporate monster into a benevolent old philanthropist.” Lee’s PR work for Rockefeller included sanitizing the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, when the Colorado National Guard killed dozens of people, among them women and children, during attacks on striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado. The strikers worked for the Rockefeller-family-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company and two other mining companies; Lee falsely claimed that some of the victims of the Guard, which effectively worked at the behest of the Rockefellers, had died of smoke inhalation from an overturned stove. He also spread word that the famous labor leader Mother Jones, who supported the strikers, ran a whorehouse. Lee’s work at Ludlow earned him the moniker “Poison Ivy” from the writer Upton Sinclair.
 
Lee, who was paid $25,000 per year for his efforts in Germany, plotted a campaign that included influencing American views with pro-Hitler newspaper opinion pieces and radio addresses. He proposed that the Nazi government’s plans for a military buildup be portrayed as central to “preventing for all time the return of the Communist peril.” In its 1934 story, Time derided the distinction Lee had recently sought to draw between the Dye Trust and the Nazi regime during an appearance before a congressional committee. “Inasmuch as [the Dye Trust] was one of the two early and potent backers of Adolf Hitler and inasmuch as the German Government has assumed pretty thorough control of private business, the committee got the impression that Mr. Lee might just as well have been retained by the Reichskanzler himself,” the magazine said.
 
Exposure of Lee’s deal led Congress to pass the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which required foreign lobbyists to register their contracts with the Justice Department. The idea seemed to be that with the need for disclosure, lobbyists would find it too embarrassing to take on clients that were hideously immoral or corrupt, no matter how much money they were offered. That assumption proved to be naïve. The FARA may have temporarily dissuaded American flacks from signing up monstrous clients, but before long it was business as usual. Latin American military men, corrupt Middle Eastern sheikhs, murderous generals from Africa and Asia—they’ve all come looking for help in Washington, D.C., over the years, and they have rarely returned home disappointed.
 
The Reagan years were a particularly rich period for foreign lobbyists, as the president backed a host of anticommunist “freedom fighters” around the globe with military and political support. The problem was that these freedom fighters—from Afghanistan to Angola to Nicaragua—were rape-and-pillage artists who regularly committed atrocities against civilians during their campaigns. Hence, dressing them up as the moral equivalent of “America’s founding fathers,” as Reagan famously described the “contra” rebels in Nicaragua, was required in order to persuade the American public and Congress that these groups were worthy of support. Beltway lobbyists eagerly rose to the challenge.
 
One remarkable piece of lobbyist image management was carried out by the firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, which helped refashion the public profile of Jonas Savimbi, a murderous, demented Angolan rebel leader backed by the apartheid regime in South Africa. Savimbi visited Washington on numerous occasions, where the lobby shop had him ferried about by stretch limousine to meetings with political leaders, think tanks, and TV networks. Black, Manafort checked repeated threats by members of Congress to cut off aid to Savimbi’s rebel group, which plundered its way through Angola with the help of billions in aid from American taxpayers.
 
In 1992, the now defunct Spy magazine ran a feature on foreign lobbyists titled “Publicists of the Damned,” which chronicled the activities of a veritable rogues’ gallery of foreign lobbyists. There was Joseph Blatchford, who ran the Peace Corps during the Nixon administration but then promoted the right-wing regime of Alfredo “Freddy” Cristiani, president of El Salvador. “All we heard over and over was that he [Cristiani] was a puppet of the death squads, a creature of millionaire coffee growers,” Blatchford complained to Spy. As the magazine drolly noted, “That unfortunate reputation is due in part to the fact that Cristiani was the candidate of the right-wing ARENA party, which was founded by death squad mastermind Roberto D’Aubuisson and supported by millionaire coffee growers.”
 
Tom Scanlon, a lobbyist for the Dominican Republic, had the difficult task of defending his client against charges of using children as slave laborers in sugar fields. What made the job especially aggravating was that the charges had been amply documented by an ABC News report. Asked about the clear presence in the ABC videos of young cane cutters, Scanlon said, “[The adult workers] just like to bring their children with them to help out in the fields.” Spy found Tommy Boggs, long one of the most influential lobbyists in town, seeking to ease foreign aid restrictions on the government of Guatemala, which was engaged in a murderous campaign to stamp out political opposition.
 
“What’s your problem?” Boggs asked a congressional staffer whom he failed to sway about Guatemala’s commitment to reform, according to Spy.
 
“These guys are murderers and thugs,” the aide said forthrightly of Boggs’s client.
 
“What would convince you that they’re moving in the right direction?” Boggs asked eagerly.
 
“I’d be impressed if they undertook a land reform program,” the aide told him.
 
Upon which Boggs replied: “You want a land reform program? I can have a land reform program on your desk this afternoon.”
 

 

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