YELTSIN HAS BEEN POLITICALLY TERMINAL FOR MONTHS; WHAT DID AL GORE KNOW — AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT?

(Washington, D.C.): Each passing day
brings alarming new medical revelations
from Moscow: Russian President Boris
Yeltsin has been physically incapable of
performing his duties since he
experienced what has been variously
described as a third heart attack, a
stroke, cardiac distress or unstable
angina shortly before the 3 July run-off
election. For example, on 23 September,
the Financial Times of London
reported in an article headlined, “Yeltsin
‘Can Work for Only 15 Minutes a
Day,'” that:

“Since [Yeltsin suffered
another heart attack], he has been
unable to work for more than very
restricted periods and has not signed
a single document since it occurred.
Instead all decrees and
orders purportedly authorized by the
Russian leader have been
signed…with a rubber stamp of the
President’s signature.”

Al Gore: Whistling Past the
Graveyard

While official circles in Washington
and elsewhere are absorbed with
speculation about the implications of
this development for Russia’s future
domestic and foreign policies, scant
attention has been given to the critical
role played by Vice President Al Gore in
what appears to be a deliberate
effort to conceal the truth about
Yeltsin’s condition following a meeting
the two had on 16 July 1996.
After the session, Mr. Gore told the
world press: “To me, he looks good.
On every score, President Yeltsin was
actively engaged and seemed in very good
shape to me.”

This statement flew in the face of
even the most medically untutored
observer’s impression of the videotaped
footage taken at the start of that
meeting. And the pool reporter covering
the Gore visit to Mr. Yeltsin’s
sanitarium — Reuters White House
correspondent Laurence McQiullan —
thoroughly validated a more ominous view
of Mr. Yeltsin’s health:

“The scene was
shocking for someone who had
seen the Russian leader at the
Kremlin in April during a visit by
President Clinton. Then Boris Yeltsin
was full of vigor, confidently joking
and showing no sign of physical
limitation. This time, his
face was pale, he had lost a
considerable amount of weight and he
had a hard time walking.“
(Emphasis added.)

At the time, the Center for Security
Policy expressed incredulity about the
Gore diagnosis⁽¹⁾:

“Now there are two possible
explanations for Mr. Gore’s view that
Mr. Yeltsin is the picture of health.
One is that Mr. Gore’s own wooden
demeanor makes him a poor judge of
others’ vital signs.

“A second and, unfortunately,
more plausible explanation for Mr.
Gore’s Magoo-like characterization of
Mr. Yeltsin’s physical condition is
that the Vice President fully
understands the dire implications for
the Clinton Administration’s Russia
policy if Mr. Yeltsin is understood
to be incapacitated. After
all, Messrs. Clinton, Gore and
Talbott, among others, have gone to
great lengths to make U.S. relations
with the Kremlin conform to a cult of
personality built around Boris
Yeltsin. His disappearance from the
scene would not only set the stage
for instability and possibly
momentous changes in Russia. It would
also leave Washington’s Russia policy
adrift.”

Washington’s New Favorite
in the Kremlin?

Yesterday, President Clinton tried to
minimize concerns that Boris Yeltsin’s
declining health — or outright
incapacitation — might have
destabilizing effects and, by implication
at least, that the Administration’s
over-investment in Yeltsin might compound
those costs to the United States. At a
White House bill-signing ceremony, he
declared:

“I think [the Russians] have
come a long way in developing the
constitutional mechanisms of
authority. They have worked out the
relationships that will exist between
President Yeltsin and Prime Minister
Chernomyrdin. And we have regular
contact with him, with the Foreign
Minister, Mr. Primakov, with others
in the executive office of the
president. And I feel
comfortable right now that our
relationships will proceed on a
normal course and a positive one.”

In so doing, Mr. Clinton
unintentionally highlighted a further
factor in the Vice President’s apparent
dissembling: Mr. Gore has developed a
close working and personal relationship
with Russian Prime Minister Viktor
Chernomyrdin — a communist apparatchik
who has reportedly amassed an immense
personal fortune from his ties with the
Soviet energy monopoly, Gazprom. To coin
a phrase, Mr. Clinton hopes to convey the
impression that Chernomyrdin is “a
man we can do business with,” even
to the point of interfering once again in
Russian internal affairs by implicitly
endorsing the Prime Minister as
Washington’s favorite to succeed Yeltsin.

Why Did Gore Declare
Yeltsin Fit?

What remains to be established is what
role, if any, did the so-called
Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission play in
orchestrating a cover-up of the truth
about Yeltsin’s health. After all, Gore’s
“Good Housekeeping” seal on the
President’s condition could only have
helped to assure that Chernomyrdin
secured the renewed mandate as Prime
Minister — and constitutional successor
to Yeltsin — that he ultimately obtained
on 10 August. Similarly, it facilitated
the continued disbursement of hundreds of
millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars (in the
form of otherwise unjustifiable IMF and
OPIC outlays) that flowed to Moscow
during and immediately after the election
period. And it seemingly affirmed the
success of the Yeltsin-centric Clinton
foreign policy — an image critical to
Mr. Clinton’s own reelection chances.

The alternative to the explanation
that Mr. Gore’s misrepresentations were
the result of a cynical mutuality of
interests with Viktor Chernomyrdin is
hardly more appetizing: Could it
be that the Russian Prime Minister looked
into the eyes of his American
interlocutor and simply lied to
the Vice President about a matter of
great importance to the national security
of the United States? If so,
then, it must be asked what other
aspects of the Gore-Chernomyrdin
Commission’s all-encompassing bilateral
agenda have been based on lies,
deceptions or disinformation?

Either way, it must be asked: Did
U.S. intelligence agree with the Vice
President’s assessment that Yeltsin was
in the pink? Is that what the
Veep was told going into his meeting with
the Russian president? If not, is there
evidence of a serious intelligence
failure — or is this simply another
example of the politicization of the
Intelligence Community under Bill
Clinton?

A Second Opinion

Answers to several of these questions
could be gleaned from remarks on 19
September 1996 by Grigori
Yavlinsky, the economist and
former self-declared democratic candidate
for the Russian presidency, before a
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty audience
in Washington. For example, concerning
the Center’s long-held suspicion that IMF
disbursements to Russia were directly or
indirectly being used to help finance
what Yavlinsky described as
“genocide” in Chechnya, he
said:

“…It looks like our
government is collecting taxes from
you…via IMF — and, by the way,
spending them on the war, the war in
Chechnya. Nobody can say that
this money is not used for that.
It [is being] used to finance the
war. But they’re not collecting even
a half of the taxes they have to
collect, but they have money from the
IMF to use it for the war in the same
time.”

Yavlinsky’s analysis of the state of
the Russian government certainly belies
the confident statements emanating from
the Clinton Administration — both those
issued back in July and yesterday:

“I want to say that the
elections in Russia were open, but there
is no person in the world which can
say that they were free and they were
equal and they were legal in terms of
legislation…specification and such
things. No, this is not true.
They were really open, and that’s it.
They were absolutely unequal,
they were absolutely unfair. The
other reason is that in these
elections, as I said to you,
non-communist forces won. But I want
to say non-communist forces won in
Russia despite Yeltsin. Not due to
Yeltsin, but despite Yeltsin,
despite the war in Chechnya, not
because the people support that, simply
the elections were constructed in
such a way that they had no way out
from that….

“….I would simply say that
Mr. Yeltsin, after his elections,
created three governments in the
country. I mean, the government of
Mr. Lebed, and the government of
prime minister, something like a
government with Mr. Chubias. It’s a
presidential administration, and that
is in the basket as well….But in
order to understand that, it
is better to look more deeply and to
understand that all those three
forces present the interests,
different interests. But I am afraid
not very much the interests of market
economy, open society, and democracy.
This is the point. And that’s why
at the moment the political idea
looks very, very chaotic.

“….But the problem for
Russia today is that this is not
a health problem, it’s
a different kind of problem, [of]
historical time and Mr. Yeltsin’s
finished already. That’s why
he created such a strange three
governments. That’s why it is not
clear what to do in Chechnya. That’s
why he can’t openly say that we
failed in Chechnya, that we have to
stop it, and that Chechens have to go
because they wouldn’t stay in the
country which killed a hundred
thousand people there at the
moment.”

The Bottom Line

It is tempting to believe that the
Clinton Administration’s relaxed attitude
about the true state of Boris
Yeltsin’s health simply tracks with the
White House view that leaders need not
make full disclosures about their medical
records. Whatever the explanation, the
implications of such non-transparency (to
put it charitably) for U.S. national
security are such that the truth
must come out about the
Clinton-Gore handling of the condition of
the Russian president.

To this end, concerted congressional
oversight is required — including
hearings before the current session
ends, effectively shutting down the
legislative branch through the U.S.
presidential election. In particular,
agreements, understandings and other
deals struck over the past few months
with what was purported to be the Yeltsin
government must be subjected to special
scrutiny. At minimum, Mr. Gore
must be obliged to come clean about what
he knew about Mr. Yeltsin’s condition and
when he knew it during the course of
the upcoming Vice Presidential debates,
if not long before.

– 30 –

1. See You
Can Fool Some of the People Some of the
Time… ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_70″>No. 96-D 70, 17
July 1996).