If A Leak Never Happens

There’s been a lot of news regarding supposed Russian involvement in our electoral process.  So far the press has covered it like a sporting event:  Trump leads by one, Clinton slashes back and picks up two runs by saying Trump’s in bed with the dreaded and re-set Russians.  The press and pundits seem to be taking bets on when the next release of emails will occur and how it will impact the presidential race.  Will it be an “October Surprise,” or will something juicy come out sooner? What the press hasn’t given much thought to is, what happens if there is no release of new and embarrassing information?  There’s a reason they may want to spend more time pondering about this.

By now, all reasonable people know Clinton’s bathroom server was hacked.  It’s almost comical to believe the Russians were interested in the correspondence between political hacks at the DNC, the DCCC or the Clinton campaign, but had no interest in learning our foreign policy secrets by hacking into the less-protected clintonmail.com server.  If you believe the Russians were involved in the DNC hack – and it’s amazing to me the Democrat spin doctors are trying to use this fact as a plus for them – then you have to assume the Russians got the goodies on Hillary’s server.  It would have seemed like a better move for her allies to say some random guy in his basement sitting in his underwear was the culprit than to push the story that the new Cold Warriors of Russia did the dirty deed since it reminds the world how vulnerable Hillary left our state secrets while acting as our chief diplomat.  But I’ll leave this up to the brighter minds of the Clinton campaign.

It would be fortunate for candidate Clinton if no more secrets came out.  However, it would be most unfortunate for the country if nothing else hits the wires and we end up with a President Clinton.  The reason is quite simply blackmail, and it wouldn’t be the first time a President Clinton faced this with the Russians.

I have a thread entitled “me in the middle of things” and I happened to be in the middle of Russian blackmail with the first candidate Clinton in 1992.  Some of this may be news to you, but I had a “friend” who looked after me while I was attempting to raise the GDP of Russia and bankrupt myself.  It was nothing Bond-like, but my friend was an FBI counter-intelligence agent that I’ll simply refer to as Raul.  Raul was interested in who was interested in me, and by me simply showing him business cards I collected, I was able to get a better idea about who I should stay away from.  Raul would sift through my business cards whenever I returned from Russia and if there was a name on the card that could be a threat, he would tell me they gave him “heartburn.”  While there were several people who gave him heartburn, there were two who constantly swirled around my brother and me that I will refer to as Boris and Vlad.  I should also point out I had heartburn whenever I was around them, too.

Boris and Vlad were very friendly to us and loved to ask a lot of questions about what we did in the U.S. and how our systems worked; particularly how our political and defense systems operated.  They had pulled up an article in the LA Times that was about my weird little niche in politics.  In the article, it noted I was working with the George Bush re-elect campaign by registering voters and doing GOTV activities.  This meant to Boris and Vlad that I was best friends with George Bush.  This made Boris and Vlad even more interested in me and made Raul suck down a box of Tums to cure his indigestion. 

In October of 1992, my brother was eating lunch at a hotel that was known for the kind of shady happenings that were in vogue in Russia in 1992.  Boris came up to my brother’s table with a large grin and said he had something for him and that I would love it.  Boris told him he was in possession of a 16 mm video of a bearded Bill Clinton on his visit to Leningrad in 1968.  The future president was seen on the video stomping on an American flag and cursing and spitting on it.  We never saw the film so I don’t know the context, but Boris assured my brother it was a doozie and that I would be happy to present it to President Bush to shift the election back his way.

My brother called me in the U.S. over a Russian landline and tried his best to tell me what had been offered without giving away all the facts.  He failed miserably and I – along with the phone listeners – knew exactly what he was talking about.  After hanging up with my brother, I made two phone calls: one to my friend in the Bush campaign and the other to ask Raul if I could meet with him.  Raul suggested we meet the next day.  My campaign friend called me back within 20 minutes and told me the information I had went straight to the president and they, reluctantly, decided to take a pass on obtaining the video (I’ll explain the reason why further down).  A few minutes after that, I got a call from Raul inviting me to come to his office and it would be really cool if I did it immediately.

When I got to Raul’s office, I went to a conference room and it seemed the meeting had drawn a crowd of other interested parties.  In addition to others in Raul’s organization, there were two more who were there representing another agency with three letters.  They asked me to describe everything over and over again but since I only had about a three-minute cryptic call with my brother, I had very little more to tell them. I was told that they knew this video existed and that the way it was described to us was very much in keeping with what they knew about it.  They also knew that Boris would have access to this video.  I was told to tell my brother to stay away from the video as it was a KGB document and he would be arrested if he tried to take it out of the country.

After the meeting ended, I asked Raul why there was a need for the larger crowd.  The president had passed on it and we already had second thoughts on ever talking to Boris again.  I said he didn’t need to worry about us.  Raul said he wasn’t worried about us (thank you very much), he was worried about the video NOT being released.  In October it was becoming very apparent Bill Clinton would be the next president and Raul was now very worried the video would be used to extract favors out of him in exchange for the video being buried.  He was worried the Russians would play to Clinton’s larger political fears and do whatever they wanted.

After my meeting with Raul and my new friends, I called my brother back on his Russian landline and told him that whatever he planned to do, he shouldn’t take the “gift” as it would end up being very bad for him.  He laughed and said, “Too late.  Two French Reuters reporters already took it from Boris.”  I called Raul back and said there was urgent information to tell him.

Within an hour I was back in the same conference room with a smaller audience, but with a new person from their Washington, DC office who must have been lurking about during the first meeting.  When I explained the video was now in the hands of the French reporters, every person in the room slumped over in their chairs with devastated looks on their faces.  They asked me 10 or so times if I was sure this was the case and told them Boris had made this point clear.  My brother and I had known these reporters as they were frequent guests at a hotel restaurant we often visited.  We even got to know them a little bit.  It certainly wasn’t surprising these two would have had the stones to take the video out of the country (I learned later they took it to their embassy). 

Raul made me sit in the lobby for a bit and when his meeting ended, he walked me out again.  I suggested to him that it was better the French had it then the Russians.  Surely the French were friends of ours where the Russians weren’t.  Raul explained to me that the French were perhaps the most proficient users of information in the world.  What they didn’t need to spend on a large army like the U.S., they spent to create an enviable spy network.  He even said many Air France flight attendants were actually working for the DSG and looking and listening for information that could be used to help French intelligence or businesses.

A month later, Clinton was elected president.  A year or so had gone by and nothing had happened to suggest Clinton was blackmailed.  Then I read a story about the French Finance Minister being arrested for pushing huge government contracts to his girlfriend.  It was quite a sensational scandal in France (not that the married Finance Minister had a girlfriend, but that big money was changing hands).  As a footnote at the end of the news story, it mentioned the investigation included whether or not the two companies involved, Elf Oil and Alcatel, were guilty of violating U.N. sanctions for selling technology and buying oil from Iraq following the first Gulf War.  Later I read the sanctions violations were removed from the charges at the request of Russia and the U.S., two permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.  I guessed this was the quid for the pro quo to keep secret films forever secret.

So, keep an eye on what comes out of the hack.  If nothing or very little comes to light, you’ll have a pretty good idea that something bigger is kept quiet for greater use later on.  For those who think Hillary was wrongly persecuted for her lax security, this is the principal reason we have such laws on the books.  Here’s hoping the Russians would rather keep her out of the White House than prey on her moral flexibility if she was elected.

Footnote on George H. W. Bush:  I’m told the main reason Bush opted not to use the film is because he thought it would backfire.  I’m sure it’s easily slipped down the memory hole, but Bush got beat up pretty badly after it leaked that his State Department was looking at the travel destinations of key Clinton campaign leaders.  I was told it included Cuba, Nicaragua, Russia and other interesting places that should have been a negative reminder of who Bill Clinton was.  But a guy named Dennis Ross, who was Number Two at State, blew the whistle on the Bushies so he could stay Number Two in a Clinton Administration, which he did.  I thought Ross did a great job managing the end of the Soviet Union with his Russian counterpart, but I lost all respect for him when he did this.