Moscow’s Old ‘Renegade’ Excuse: ‘What Did Gorbachev Know and When Did He Know It?’

(Washington, D.C.): In the wake of
persistent disclaimers from Mikhail
Gorbachev that he knew nothing of — not
to say authorized — a brutal crackdown
in Vilnius on Saturday, the Center for
Security Policy today called on Congress
to demand an answer to an urgent
question: “What did
Gorbachev know and when did he know
it?”

Responding to reporters questions
today, President Gorbachev blamed the
brutality in Lithuania — which killed at
least 14 persons and injured 144 — on a “local
military officer.” Responding
to reporters’ questions, Gorbachev stated
that he only learned of the
crackdown Sunday morning when he was
awakened. Interestingly, rather
than convey to his audience any sense of
remorse for this ostensibly unauthorized
action, Gorbachev used the
occasion to launch a new round of
criticism against independence-seeking
Lithuanians.

According to Boris Pugo, the former
Latvian KGB chief and recently appointed
Minister of the Interior, the
Lithuanian demonstrators
precipitated the bloodshed by firing on
Moscow’s armed forces. When Lithuania’s
President Landsbergis placed an urgent
phone call to the Soviet president in the
midst of the confrontation to dispel any
illusions Gorbachev may have had about
this preposterous charge, he was told by
Kremlin aides that Gorbachev was
“too busy having lunch” and
would not take the call.

In case these transparent lies proved
inadequate to insulate Gorbachev from
responsibility for the bloodshed in
Vilnius, the Soviet leadership has
apparently decided to try its
well-rehearsed excuse of blaming
“rogue military officers” for
Soviet actions which could jeopardize
improving U.S.-Soviet relations. And no
wonder: This ploy has been
demonstrated to be singularly effective
in the past in preserving Gorbachev’s
image as a champion of fundamental human
rights and progressive policies at home
and abroad — in spite of evidence to the
contrary. Consider but a few
examples:

• In April 1989, the murder of 19
  Georgians in Tblisi by Soviet
  troops wielding sharpened shovels
  and poison gas was blamed by
  Mikhail Gorbachev on local
  military forces. Then-Soviet
  Foreign Minister Eduard
  Shevardnadze has subsequently
  intimated that he almost resigned
  over probable Kremlin complicity
  in the massacre.
• Shevardnadze, in belatedly
  admitting on 23 October 1989 that
  the Krasnoyarsk radar
  violated the 1972 ABM Treaty,
  again signalled that the civilian
  leadership had been blind-sided
  by the military.
• In March 1990, scores of Soviet-made
  SS-23 shorter-range
  missiles banned by the 1987 INF
  Treaty were discovered illegally
  hidden in East Germany,
  Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. The
  Kremlin put out the word that
  this was the work of the military
  and that the discovery of these
  caches came as a shock
  to the Gorbachev regime.
• Some U.S. officials have found
  comfort from Kremlin explanations
  that the massive Soviet fraud in
  connection with the new Conventional
  Forces in Europe agreement
  — by which tens of thousands of
  tanks, artillery pieces, and
  armored personnel vehicles were
  slipped outside of the zone
  covered by the Treaty or exempted
  by simply calling them “naval
  infantry” — were also
  the work of the military acting
  without permission from the
  Kremlin’s civilian leadership.
• On 4 January 1991, the Dimitry
  Fermanov — a
  Soviet-flagged vessel — was
  intercepted and diverted in the
  Red Sea, after a multinational
  boarding team discovered military
  hardware on the ship which
  included command and
  control vehicles, rocket
  launchers, explosives, tank
  parts, and communications
  equipment. Such
  equipment was not listed on the
  ship’s manifest. The ship
  sailed from Odessa in the Soviet
  Union and was bound for the port
  of Aqaba in Jordan — and
  presumably its cargo was headed
  for Iraq in violation of the UN
  embargo.
• The Washington Times
  reported on 9 January that Bush
  Administration officials were
  downplaying the issue suggesting
  that the Kremlin was
  “unaware of the renegade
  ship.” (Emphasis added.) One
  Administration official actually
  went so far as to posit that the
  ship captain may have been trying
  to sell the embargoed items on
  his own.

The Center for Security Policy believes
that such bald-faced prevarications must
not be allowed to stand. Doing so merely encourages
additional Soviet repression in
the expectation that such violent
behavior will have no consequences.

This
danger is further compounded to the
extent that the Bush Administration acts
— notwithstanding this behavior — to
provide U.S. taxpayer loan guarantees and
other subsidies to Moscow center, even as
the crackdown proceeds. On 12 December
1990, $1 billion in agricultural credit
guarantees through the Agriculture
Department’s Commodity Credit Corporation
(CCC) program and up to $300 million in
U.S. Export-Import Bank insurance
coverage and loan guarantees were
authorized for the Soviet Union.

In what might come to be seen as “AGSCAM,”
White House Press Spokesman Marlin
Fitzwater today announced that less
than $200 million remained in uncommitted
CCC credit guarantees. The
remainder, he claimed, had already been
spent or committed over the month since
they were originally authorized.
U.S. commercial banks — which actually
extend the loans in support of U.S. grain
sales and which are, in turn,
“covered” by risk-free taxpayer
guarantees — could possibly be prevented
from proceeding in the case of
transactions involving grain that has not
yet left the United States. This
could probably be accomplished by the
Administration, or the Congress,
rescinding these taxpayer guarantees prior
to the physical shipment of grain
to the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture’s CCC and the Export-Import
Bank should be compelled by the Congress
to reveal as soon as possible all
available data, on a transaction by
transaction basis, concerning their
respective allocations of American loan
guarantees destined for the Soviet Union.
Included in this data package should be
the names of U.S. corporate
beneficiaries, the American banks
involved in extending the actual loans to
Moscow and the timing and amount of each
and every U.S. government-guaranteed
trade transaction.

The purpose of these inquiries should
be, in part, to determine whether or not
these seemingly accelerated commitments
of American taxpayer credit guarantees to
the USSR were, in fact, spring-loaded
and unduly politicized. The
Center is concerned that fears over the
past thirty-days — shared by the U.S.
executive branch, American industry and
the Soviet government — that a
crackdown by Moscow center would, in all
likelihood, result in Western
credit-related sanctions, gave rise to a
concerted effort to shove U.S. credit
commitments to USSR out the door as
quickly as possible.

In view of these developments, the
Center calls — in addition to the
aforementioned data disclosures — on the
Administration and the Congress to go beyond
words of condemnation for the bloody
crackdown and to take the following
actions:

• The $1 billion in
  government credit guarantees now
  being extended through the
  Commodity Credit Corporation
  should be halted at once.
  Those grain shipments covered by
  such guarantees that have not
  physically left U.S. ports should
  be interdicted and the relevant
  guarantees rescinded.
• The $50 million in U.S.
  guarantees authorized by the
  Department of Agriculture on 9
  January to cover freight costs
  for shipping the U.S. subsidized
  grain sales to the Soviet Union
  — which went largely
  unreported — should
  immediately be terminated.
• The $300 million in
  commercial insurance and loan
  guarantees being made available
  through the U.S. Export-Import
  Bank should be stopped forthwith.
  American firms are reportedly
  rushing to secure such Eximbank
  guarantees prior to the executive
  branch or Congress acting in such
  a way as to interrupt such
  “taxpayer-risk” deals.
• Any consideration of
  “special membership
  status” for the USSR in the
  International Monetary Fund and
  World Bank should be shelved
  indefinitely.
• The United States should
  terminate any and all technical
  assistance to the strategic
  Soviet energy sector.
  The U.S.-Soviet Energy Working
  Group, operated out of the Energy
  Department, should be disbanded
  or at the very least suspended.
• Congressional approval of
  the U.S.-Soviet Trade Agreement
  slated to be sent by the White
  House to the U.S. Congress this
  session should be tied to the
  initiation and successful
  conclusion of negotiations
  between the Soviet Union and the
  Baltic states — guaranteeing the
  latters’ independence.
• Planned liberalization of
  the COCOM “core list”
  of high technologies to
  be made available to the Soviet
  Union in February should be
  indefinitely deferred.
• Gorbachev’s Nobel Peace
  Prize should be returned.
  At the very least, Gorbachev
  should be called upon to donate
  his $750,000 cash award to the
  hospitals in Vilnius caring for
  those injured in the crackdown.

The Center also believes that a
General Accounting Office report to
determine the full array of
“technical assistance” and
exchange programs underway between all
agencies of the United States and the
Soviet Union and the estimated total
dollar value of such assistance is
needed. In addition, congressional
hearings should be immediately convened
to consider the competence of and process
followed by the Bush Administration in
addressing the prospects for the Soviet
crackdown now underway over the previous
90-days.

Finally, in the future, the Bush
Administration should be enjoined from
providing U.S. government credit
guarantees and other assistance flows to
Moscow central authorities. Instead, such
flows should be earmarked exclusively for
the reformist republics and the
freedom-bound Baltic states.