FROM THE FOLKS WHO BROUGHT YOU THE ‘HALBOTTS’: CLINTON TAPS THE HARD LEFT FOR EMBASSY HELSINKI

(Washington, D.C.): For anyone
concerned about the direction of U.S.
national security policy, last week was
pretty portentous. Consider the following
illustrative — and alarming —
developments ⁽¹⁾:

• On Tuesday, the Senate assailed
  the Clinton Administration for
  its dismal handling of relations
  with Moscow in the course of
  debating the President’s choice
  of one of his closest friends,
  Strobe Talbott, to become Deputy
  Secretary of State. The
  fact that fully thirty-one
  Senators voted against this
  nomination is evidence of the
  serious questions that are now
  being raised about the
  Clinton-Talbott belief that
  Russia is a reliable
  “partner for peace.”
• That same day, an official who
  held a crucial position in the
  Central Intelligence Agency’s
  Soviet/Russian
  counter-intelligence branch,
  Aldrich Ames, was arrested and
  charged with having spied for the
  Kremlin for nine years. This
  revelation raised serious
  questions about the Clinton
  Administration’s security and
  counter-intelligence practices.
  And,
• On Thursday, the Administration
  unveiled draft legislation that
  would eviscerate the existing
  Export Administration Act. Its
  proposal would prevent any
  further effective use of export
  controls as a tool for countering
  the hemorrhage of strategic
  dual-use technology to those who
  might use it against the U.S. or
  its allies. The legislation
  raises serious questions
  about the Clinton
  Administration’s tendency to
  define national interest in the
  post-Cold War era narrowly in
  terms of “economic
  security” — and
  for those overseas intent on
  exploiting this shortsighted
  mindset to advance the
  proliferation of weapons of mass
  destruction and other dangerous
  programs.

Introducing Derek Shearer

In the wake of these developments, on
23 February President Clinton made a
remarkable announcement — one that is,
interestingly enough, closely related to
the foregoing, ominous developments: He
chose another close friend, Derek
Shearer, to become the U.S. Ambassador to
Finland.

By any standard, Derek Shearer is a
bizarre choice to represent the United
States in so sensitive a post as Embassy
Helsinki. He is, after all, a pedigreed
radical socialist whose enthusiastic
embrace of central planning and
government diktat in the economic sphere
is a matter of record.

In his book Economic Democracy
published in 1980 with Martin Carnoy, a
colleague from the hard-left Institute
for Policy Studies (IPS), Shearer calls
for “dismantling, or at least
restricting, the power
of…corporations” he deems to be
too “impersonal and powerful.”
He advocates a “strategy of
reform” that “must transfer
capital from the corporations to the
public….The logical vehicle for that
process should be the government.”
His goal is to permit the government’s
takeover of entire industries
“without the immediate financial and
ideological burdens that large-scale
nationalization efforts would
entail.”

Unfortunately, these cannot be
discounted as merely the romantic
rantings of a Marxist academic, although
Shearer spent most of the past thirteen
years as a professor and administrator at
Occidental College in Los Angeles. From
1981 (when his wife, Ruth Goldway, was
elected mayor of Santa Monica,
California) until 1986, he served as a
member of — and dominant force on — the
city planning commission. Those
familiar with the devastating effects of
the Goldway-Shearer program on what came
to be known as “the People’s
Republic of Santa Monica” knows that
Shearer is committed to applying
his socialist agenda.

Where it suits Shearer’s purpose to do
so, however, he is not above dissembling
about his objectives. For example, in the
IPS-sponsored magazine, In These
Times, Shearer confessed shortly
before Economic Democracy was
published that he chose the title to
disguise his real purpose: advancing
socialism. As he put it:

“Socialism has a bad name in
America and no amount of wishful
thinking on the part of the left is
going to change that in our
lifetimes….The words ‘Economic
Democracy’ are an adequate and
effective replacement.”

According to a 1992 op.ed. published
in the Wall Street Journal, ⁽²⁾
Shearer elaborated on this point at a
1981 conference of left-wing activists
convened by Ralph Nader:

“While we can’t use the ‘S’
word [socialism] too effectively in
American politics, we have found that
in the greatest tradition of American
advertising that the word ‘economic
democracy’ sells. You can take it
door-to-door like Fuller Brushes, and
the door will not be slammed in your
face.”

The Talbott Connection

Such cynicism and disingenuousness is
all too reminiscent of the practice of
other Clinton appointees — notably,
Morton Halperin at the National Security
Council and the State Department’s Strobe
Talbott (“Halbotts,” for short)
— in response to hard questions about
their past, left-wing writings.
Presumably, like the Halbotts, he will
disavow the more radical of these
writings or dissemble if challenged about
them at his confirmation hearing
(scheduled before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee at 3:00 p.m.
tomorrow). As with the Halbotts,
however, the record contains little if
any evidence to support claims to that
effect.

There is another, even more direct tie
between Derek Shearer and the new Deputy
Secretary of State, moreover. Talbott is
Shearer’s brother-in-law by virtue of his
marriage to Derek’s sister, Brooke, who
happens also to be a senior assistant to
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. It was
reportedly through Talbott that Shearer
first became close to Bill Clinton while
Talbott and Clinton were Rhodes scholars
and roommates at Oxford. Thanks to these
intimate relationships, it seems
likely that Derek Shearer will enjoy more
influence with the President — and may
have considerably more impact on policy
— than the average U.S. Ambassador to
Finland.

That prospect requires the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee and the full
U.S. Senate to take an especially close
look at this nominee. In particular, two
areas merit special investigation: (1) In
light of the Ames case, has Derek
Shearer’s nomination been subjected to a
proper security vetting? And (2)
Are U.S. interests really going
to be served by having an individual with
Shearer’s policy predilections
representing this country in a
strategically important capital overseas,
let alone helping shape American security
policy?

How Did This Guy Get A
Security Clearance?

In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
Derek Shearer was an Associate Fellow at
the radical left-wing Institute for
Policy Studies. Worse yet, he worked for
one of its foreign spin-off organizations
— the rabidly anti-American
“Dispatch News Service.” Based
in Manila, Shearer and other Dispatch
staffers filed reports on the Vietnam war
that were virulently critical of the U.S.
and unfailingly sympathetic to Hanoi. One
of Shearer’s colleagues at Dispatch News
Service, Wilfred Burchett, moreover, was
confirmed to have been a long-time paid
agent for Soviet intelligence when
Burchett’s former KGB control officer,
Yuri Krotkov, defected to the West and
testified in 1969 before the U.S. Senate
Subcommittee on Internal Security. ⁽³⁾

Interestingly, Shearer neglected to
mention his involvement with the
Institute for Policy Studies and Dispatch
News in papers formally submitted to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee in
connection with his nomination. About the
period from 1968-1980, he says only that
he was a
“journalist/consultant/lecturer in
Washington, D.C., Boston, Massachusetts,
and Los Angeles, California.”

It must be asked: Was Shearer
similarly selective in disclosures he
made to those responsible for evaluating
his suitability to hold a senior U.S.
government position? This is
particularly germane given that the
Ambassador to Finland would have, among
his other functions, responsibility for
overseeing a CIA organization in a
strategic nation at a particularly
sensitive time. Or did the fact that
Shearer was a close friend of the
President and a relative of the
Administration’s senior policy-maker on
Russian affairs preclude a
rigorous security investigation?
Alternatively, is this case —
like that of Morton Halperin and Rick
Ames — simply evidence of the depths to
which the security screening process and
counter-intelligence apparatus of this
country have plunged?

Clearly, the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee should familiarize itself with
the contents of this classified study before
considering the Shearer nomination. At
the very least, Director Woolsey should
be asked to address its findings — and
implications — in executive session,
together with other security-related
issues arising from this appointment,
prior to a final Senate vote.

‘It’s The Economy, Stupid’

While the Committee is at it, it
should also examine the role Shearer
played in giving birth to and defining
the terms of reference for the National
Economic Council. This organization
was undoubtedly instrumental in
formulating the Clinton team’s
exceedingly ill-advised mutation of the
Export Administration Act.

According to an article in the 9
September 1992 edition of the Wall
Street Journal, Shearer’s
“contributions to the Clinton
program” included:

“…a proposal for an
‘Economic Security Council’ to
oversee the nation’s policies in such
key areas as foreign trade and
international monetary affairs. And
he has taken a hand in shaping Mr.
Clinton’s positions on dealings with
the former Soviet Union.”

In an ominous indicator of what was to
come, when it took office, the Clinton
team dropped “security” from
the title of its new economic council. The
EAA episode suggests that national
security considerations have also been
dispensed with by the National Economic
Council in its pursuit of penny-wise,
pound-foolish strategies for promoting
small sectors of the U.S. economy at the
expense of larger national interests.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy
believes Derek Shearer to be one of the
most preposterous choices yet made by the
Clinton Administration in the course of
staffing up its foreign and defense
policy team — a extraordinary indictment
when one considers other dubious
candidates.

Shearer is not qualified on the basis
of governmental experience; apart from
his stint damaging the economy of Santa
Monica, he has had a grand total of three
months as a Deputy Under Secretary
of Commerce, a post which he mysteriously
quit in May 1993 with little notice. He
is a most improbable exemplar of free
market democracy to dispatch to a
still-overly socialized Finland. And he
appears entirely unsuited to have any
responsibility for or oversight of
sensitive intelligence operations in
light of what might charitably be called
his “checkered” security
background.

The Center urges that this nomination
be withdrawn — and soundly defeated by
the Senate if it is not.

– 30 –

1. For more
information on the first three, see the
Center’s recent Decision Briefs
entitled, Senate Should Send
a Message to Talbott: He Has Been
Unacceptably ‘Wrong’ on Russia, Israel
(No. 94-D 20,
22 February 1994); Not
‘Business as Usual’: Russian Spying
Requires Sea Change in Benign View of
Moscow’s Intentions ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_21″>No. 94-D 21, 23
February 1994); and Timing is
Everything: Clinton Responds to Spy
Revelation by Facilitating KGB, Others’
Technology Theft Operations ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_22″>No. 94-D 22, 24
February 1994.

2. See, “The
Economist on Clinton’s Left,” by
Thomas DiLorenzo, The Wall Street
Journal, 10 September 1992.

3. See pp. 238-39
and 342-43 of Russ Braley’s Bad News:
Foreign Policy of the New York Times,
(Chicago, Regnery, Gateway, 1984).