Chapter 7
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CORRUPTION:
Immunity, Impunity, and Impudence
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Corrupt, compromised, and even recently incarcerated candidates appear poised to enter parliament in this summer’s national elections.
—U.S. Embassy Sofia
June 18, 2009
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BULGARIA IS A CULTURE SO THOROUGHLY PERMEATED by corruption it is difficult for outsiders to conceptualize it—even with vivid examples provided by the embassy. Technically part of Europe but spiritually entrenched in the Balkan region, it is surrounded by Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Romania, and the Black Sea. A cable entitled “Sofia’s Mean Streets” linked the crumbling (and stinking) urban landscape to the mutri culture of criminal thugs.
Once a traveler hits the airport access road . . . drab, decrepit Soviet-style blocks rise up, in stark juxtaposition to the Porsche dealership . . . Crumbling streets with unevenly patched pavement, potholes that can pass for tank traps, and sidewalks crammed with parked cars are routine. A years-long garbage mess has gotten worse over a contract dispute with the collection companies, and refuse is both scattered and piled high. Packs of wild dogs roam widely.
Bad as that is, the organized crime situation is ugly as well . . . Organized criminals and their no-neck, black-leather-clad bodyguards flaunt and disobey the law; big black SUVs are the rage, barreling down streets ignoring traffic and parking regulations. Seeing no force to control them, many ordinary Bulgarians have followed suit, running lights, passing against oncoming city traffic . . . young people find “mutri”—cool guys above the law with money and status—an attractive role model.1
Local journalism is no help. “Reporters and editors accept bribes to cover stories, to print propaganda articles as though they were news, and to not print information that sponsors do not approve. The media’s cooption obviously limits its ability to serve as a voice for civil society.” 2
Not even soccer is exempt. Most teams in the country are owned or controlled by organized crime figures, who use them as fronts for money laundering and tax evasion. The last three presidents of the team Lokomotiv Plovdiv were all assassinated. Years of blatant match fixing has disgusted fans, who now stay away, no small thing in a country whose defeat of Germany in the 1994 World Cup advanced it to the semifinals: “many Bulgarians only half-jokingly refer to this as the country’s greatest accomplishment since the fall of communism.” 3
The justice system offers little help. The embassy’s portrayal of organized crime bosses is reminiscent of cartoon characters. The brothers Krasimir “Big Margin” Marinov and Nikolay “Small Margin” Marinov made a mockery of Bulgaria’s courts when they were arrested and then released on bail, despite their spiderweb syndicate involving drugs, fraud, car thefts, smuggling, extortion, racketeering, and prostitution. The embassy wrote that the Marinov case, postponed four times, “has become symbolic of the inability of the Bulgarian courts to bring about swift justice.” Other infamous gangsters have included drug kingpin Zlatomir “the Beret” Ivanov, Nikola “the Beaver” Ivanov, and Vasil Krumov Bozhkov, aka “the Skull.” The embassy illustrated the government’s complicity in this network in a cable that described Todor “Borat” Batkov, who officers said served as a frontman for local businesses and interests of the infamous Russian-Israeli businessman Michael Cherney, aka Mikhail Chorny. While the Bulgarian government labeled Chorny a national security risk and banned him from entering Bulgaria, the embassy reported that Batkov received Bulgaria’s highest honor for his donations to ill children, orphanages, emergency rooms, and local universities. He also gave eleven cars to the Ministry of Interior.4
Things looked up, briefly, when the police arrested Aleksi “the Tractor” Petrov, considered one of the most untouchable organized crime figures. He was nabbed in Operation Octopus in February 2010 in a sting that raided twenty strip clubs and other illicit businesses. Petrov was charged with extortion, forceful debt collection, prostitution, trafficking, fraud, and money laundering.5 But months later he was released from jail to house arrest, and then released from house arrest to reappear on the streets. He promptly announced he’d be running for president.6
Lest this 1920s Chicago-of-the-Balkans seem like an outlier, the leaked cables offer overwhelming evidence that U.S. embassies in dozens of countries were seized with the problem of corruption and wrote about it voluminously. The heading “corruption” turns up in 24,182 leaked cables, “organized crime” is mentioned in 6,905, and “bribery” in another 1,870. Corruption was the theme of 1,054 cables from Iraq, 953 from Afghanistan, and 903 from Nigeria.
When it comes to corruption, Bulgaria is far from the worst. In 2015 the country ranked sixty-ninth—less than halfway down Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2015, where it is tied with Jamaica. The annually published rankings are a composite index based on a combination of surveys and assessments of how people view a country’s public sector. Of course, the United States itself does not come with clean hands. It ranked sixteenth in 2015, tied with Austria in this 168-country index. The Scandinavian countries vie for first place; Afghanistan, Somalia, and North Korea bring up the rear.7
Why does it matter? Corruption is a barrier to economic development and foreign investment. It is expensive—in some cases consuming a sizable percentage of a country’s GDP. Public works projects offer telling illustrations of this type of corruption-driven inflation. A World Bank report estimates that it costs three to six times as much to build a road on the Russian side of the border than on the Finnish side, despite a similar climate.8 In 2007, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympics would cost $12 billion. But at the 2014 event, the reported cost of $50 billion got almost as much ink as the athletes.9
Corruption ought to matter to the U.S. government because it robs U.S. businesses of public tenders from around the world for everything from fighter jets to nuclear power plants—projects that they might otherwise win on merit. In countries struggling to forge a civil society, it undermines public confidence in democracy. Respect for public officials and institutions plummets. The rule of law founders under the weight of corrupt police and court systems. As criminals muscle in, space opens for organized crime, and the possibility of meaningful partnerships with governments grows remote. Trafficking in drugs, weapons, and people pits the United States against potential allies. Given increasingly global connections, organized crime and money laundering funds more mischief and, occasionally, even terrorism. The coopted country stalls out.
The cables suggest that embassies believed corruption was a major impediment to American foreign policy initiatives. Yet it is unclear that policymakers focused on terrorism understood how thoroughly corruption thwarted cooperation. Corruption is an old story, and globalization has brought its economic and political consequences to the United States in ways that Washington leadership is only beginning to understand. Despite the number of embassy cables, policymakers did relatively little to confront the issue.
While corruption can suffuse all aspects of life, embassy reporting centered on three areas: elections—no surprise given the United States’ long-standing commitment to supporting democracy; procurement—especially important when U.S. firms are competing for public tenders; and organized crime—a clear threat to U.S. security, given the reach of illicit global networks. Officers also found time to highlight the ways a lack of good governance touches ordinary citizens—everything from a phony law degree in Pilsen to a Potemkin village in Turkmenistan.
YOUR VOTE COUNTS! (MAYBE)
Americans place great stock in elections as indicators of democracy and are heavily invested in seeing that other countries carry out elections that are free and fair. That finely resonating phrase has a meaning in the United States that doesn’t always translate overseas. The U.S. government, along with the international community and many NGOs, helps fund the cost of elections and training for local poll workers. The taxpayer-funded National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and its counterpart, the International Republican Institute, frequently serve overseas as election observers, and the Carter Center is only the best known among many NGOs that have made a reputation monitoring elections in struggling countries. They join a flotilla of international organizations, ranging from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to the Organization of American States to the African Union, all of whom attempt to monitor this most basic aspect of democracy. Observers only enter countries that want their presence, but most countries have a strong incentive to have their elections observed and characterized positively by international monitors. One might wonder how it is even possible to pull off electoral fraud, given all those international observers, modern technology, and social media.
Embassy personnel play a crucial role in elections. Their sustained presence in a country allows officers to build long-term contacts among various political parties and candidates. Their familiarity with local people, languages, and regions builds trust and provides perspective. Embassy officers frequently serve as on-the-ground election monitors. Occasionally their reporting offers eye-popping examples of the gap between Washington’s ideal of “free and fair” elections and what actually happens.
Embassy reporting on the 2010 Ukraine election (which brought Viktor Yanukovych to power) shows the dangers of attaching too much meaning to voting. The winner was deposed in 2014 after a six-month opposition campaign attracted worldwide attention (including that of Russian president Vladimir Putin). Given the disastrous aftermath of the coup, which led to civil war, a Russian invasion, loss of the Crimea, and continued unrest in the eastern part of the country, not to mention economic free fall, Ukraine offers a cautionary tale: elections in fundamentally nondemocratic places cannot be a measure of democracy.
Although the U.S. embassy in Kyiv clearly saw that the main issue in the election turned on whether Ukraine would cast its lot with Europe or Russia, reporting officers could not have realized how high the stakes would become. Yanukovych, born in the eastern Donetsk region and advocate of a pro-Russia policy, won against Yulia Tymoshenko, then prime minister and advocate of a closer relationship with the European Union. Tymoshenko lost 45.5 percent to 49 percent and alleged election fraud—charges that went nowhere. She was ultimately jailed for corruption by her rival Yanukovych while the EU negotiated behind the scenes for her release.
Yanukovych reneged on signing an EU association agreement in November 2014, an act that unleashed the Euromaidan, called the largest pro-European demonstration in the history of the European Union. The protests, which continued through February, were remarkable for the persistence of people willing to endure freezing weather, for the large turnout, and for the ensuing military intervention by Russia, which led to the loss of Crimea and the ongoing military skirmishes in the eastern part of Ukraine. As crowds gathered daily in Independence Square in Kyiv, the violent government reprisals resulted in the killings of hundreds of protestors and led to Yanukovych’s removal from office. The events have only heightened the urgency of the question of whether Ukraine belongs in the West or the East.
Such a dark future seemed unthinkable given the hopeful tenor of election day reporting in February 2010. Embassy officers painted colorful scenes, describing some voters traveling to precincts in horse-drawn sleighs. One woman slipped on ice outside the polling station and broke her leg. After a trip to the hospital and a cast, she sent her husband back to the precinct to ask for a mobile ballot box, throwing local election officials into confusion over how to accommodate her.10
Embassy reporters were warmly welcomed at the precincts. “Anxious PEC (Precinct Election Commission) members sometimes sought our reassurance that they were doing everything correctly; PEC members, domestic observers, and ordinary voters often asked how we thought the whole process was going.” However, officers also described devious ways in which fraud was perpetrated. The idea of planting pens filled with slowly disappearing ink—a stunt worthy of Mad magazine—was not beneath both sides, evidently.
The idea of disappearing ink occurred to both camps. In Bila Tserkva, where Yulia Tymoshenko took 69 percent of the vote, the problem of disappearing ink was not discovered at one precinct until the counting stage, when one-quarter of the ballots turned out to be blank. Embassy observers were treated to a Florida 2000 exercise in which grannies on the PEC held ballots up to the light trying to discern voter intent from indentations left by the pens with the disappearing ink. Local observers illuminating ballots with cigarette lighters barely avoided setting some of them on fire.11
In Georgia, election task force members in 2008 also worried about hijinks with the voting pens, along with a nasty fight over stuffing ballot boxes and voter intimidation with slogans such as “To the Grave with Saakashvili,” and by “promoting tension by spreading propaganda about disappearing ink, taking photos of ballots, and waving around suspect protocols in front of the media.” 12
In Uzbekistan, elections in 2009 were so obviously unfree that the OSCE opted not to deploy a full election observation mission. The embassy used the opportunity to sketch the political climate in the country.
The GOU [government of Uzbekistan] approach is characterized by the paternalistic assumption that ordinary Uzbek citizens are not ready for real, “no holds barred” democracy. Accordingly, the parliamentary elections are a type of semi-democratic exercise wherein the government strictly limits the “variables” and then allows the elections themselves to proceed with little apparent interference. After first vetting very narrow parameters for candidacy and virtually guaranteeing that eventual parliamentarians will fully support the executive branch (if not completely agree with each other), the GOU made the elections themselves as technically correct as possible.
Although the GOU seems to miss the point of the most essential aspects of a democratic society, particularly a free press and robust political dialogue with opposing viewpoints, it tries to make up for its democratic shortcomings by focusing on minute details during the elections themselves. For example, our teams noted each polling station had a first aid room staffed by medical professionals, and a “mother and child” room stocked with toys, so that parents can comfortably vote without worrying about childcare. . . . Polling station officials generally appeared to be conscientious and committed if not downright enthusiastic. (One poloff noticed an election chairman removing his own eyeglasses and lending them to an elderly gentleman who was unable to read the ballot.)
The most obvious technical weakness on election day was the widespread practice of allowing a single family member to cast proxy ballots for all of the eligible voters in the family. Evidence of this practice was noted in every polling station that embassy observers visited. In many polling stations, there was not even an attempt to conceal this “family voting.” In full view of embassy teams, a single voter would present multiple passports at the registration point and receive multiple ballots in return. One team observed a single voter stuffing an estimated 30 ballots into the ballot box. In other polling stations, particularly those where most people had already voted, observers looked over the registration lists and noted long series of identical signatures, indicating that a single person had “signed out” numerous ballots. Only in a few polling places did election officials attempt to conceal the evidence of proxy voting by refusing to issue multiple ballots while the embassy’s observers were clearly watching. (COMMENT: Emboffs thought that the voters presenting multiple passports appeared visibly upset not to receive all of “their” ballots, and believe that election officials probably told those voters to come back after the embassy team left. End Comment.) Evidence of proxy voting was still apparent on the registration lists, though election officials at those locations tried to convince embassy observers that very similar handwriting “runs in the family.”
And then culture intervenes.
For many (particularly in the rural areas), election day seemed to be a social occasion and a welcome break from their routine. Several of the polling stations were playing loud, festive music; one of our teams saw a number of people dancing . . . prominent members of the community were seen to cast their ballots and then nip off for a cup of tea, a plate of plov (rice pilaf), or a bowl of stew with members of the election commission.
Welcoming 18-year-olds seemed to be a source of pride. Several of the election commissions had planned a special acknowledgement for first-time voters upon registration. One polling station even had small gifts for all young people casting ballots for the first time.13
The bonhomie in Uzbekistan contrasts with elections that are outright nasty, violent, and underhanded. In Slovakia, a middle school teacher who pursued public office to improve the quality of the public schools began questioning some of the district mayor’s sweetheart deals with local mobsters. Shortly after a warning phone call, he awoke to find his car engulfed in flames outside his apartment.14 Elsewhere, ruling parties ensure their entrenchment by writing (or rewriting) the rules, moving the goalposts, and otherwise making it impossible for any opposition to run a real campaign.
In Russia, frustrated opposition candidates in the city of Ryazan (about two hundred kilometers southeast of Moscow) detailed the ways elections were rigged by United Russia, the ruling political party of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. Municipal officials allowed United Russia to place huge billboards in government-owned bus stops but told opposition groups that there was no bus stop space available or dramatically inflated the advertising rates.
United Russia also had candidates stand outside popular shopping centers and large grocery stores handing out shots of vodka to passersby . . . a sure way to attract the homeless, alcoholics, and the lower class to vote in favor of United Russia . . . One opposition candidate said city employees who voted for other parties would be harassed at their workplaces or even fired. The candidate alleged that local government even targeted the sick at hospitals and clinics, denying them medical services and medication if they did not vote for United Russia.15
Voters aren’t fools. If they suspect fraud they simply stay home, as was the case in Bashkortostan, the most populous Russian republic, situated alongside the Ural Mountains. “No one we talked to bothers to vote because, they say, the results are pre-ordained,” the embassy reported. “Several people commented on the 2005 elections when voter turnout was alleged to be 80 percent although people in the cities do not vote. It turned out that thousands of fake ballots were printed; activists protested and provided evidence of the fraud to Moscow.16
Embassies cataloged almost unlimited ways to throw an election. For example, the presence of outside observers hardly guarantees that elections will be aboveboard. It all depends on who is invited. Zimbabwe’s longtime dictator Robert Mugabe reached out only to those nations that had never voted against Zimbabwe in the UN—Venezuela, China, Iran, Russia, and Brazil. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Brazil’s envoy declared that the 2008 elections had been, in his words, “exemplary.” 17
Having a system in place is no guarantee against fraud. In many places, institutions ostensibly set up to ensure free elections are shams designed to do the opposite. In Nicaragua, the Supreme Electoral Council used the Orwellian tactic of protecting electoral integrity by severely restricting election observation and threatening to disqualify opposition candidates.18 In Cameroon, after months of tussling over the biased rules of the election agency ELECAM, the United States sent a message of disapproval by boycotting the public swearing-in of the leadership—a move that was joined by the British, Dutch, Canadian, and EU chiefs of mission.19
Elsewhere, technology has enhanced the old-fashioned practice of vote buying. In the Bahamas, the embassy found that votes were worth anywhere from $250 to $2,000 in three constituencies. “Workers allegedly offered cash in return for cell-phone camera pictures of PLP (Progressive Liberal Party) ballots, causing the parliamentary registrar in charge of voting to ban cell phones from polling stations.” 20 And if those in power are still uncertain of victory, they can always postpone elections. In Angola, the National Assembly sat for sixteen years before a new election was called, despite constitutional provisions for elections every four years.21
Why would a seat in parliament be worth such high-risk (and high-cost) gambits? In a word, immunity. Most parliaments offer sitting members immunity from prosecution. To illustrate the lengths to which the concept is taken, we’ll let the U.S. embassy in Bulgaria have the last word. Reporting on the consequences of a court decision that allowed gangsters to go free on bail to run for parliament, where their position would gain them immunity from prosecution, the embassy wrote that amid a climate of opaque financing and shadowy political parties, “There is a strong stench of malevolent manipulation of the electoral system by entrenched and unscrupulous interests.” 22
BUY AMERICAN! PROCUREMENT, BRIBERY, AND SWEETHEART DEALS
In 1976, the U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in response to revelations that U.S. companies bribed foreign officials to gain contracts. Enacted in 1977, the statute makes it illegal for a citizen or corporation of the United States to influence, bribe, or seek an advantage from a public official of another country.23 “Everyone else is doing it” would no longer suffice as an excuse. The act was amended in 1998 to conform to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions.24 To date, the thirty-four OECD members and seven nonmember states have signed the convention, a small proportion when contrasted with the much larger number of countries that have not signed.
Public tenders, in which billions of dollars are often at stake, are especially vulnerable to opaque decision-making processes. Former Communist countries, no matter how bright other aspects of their transition to the free market, failed repeatedly when it came to transparent tenders. Even those in Central Europe that were among the first to incorporate themselves into the European Union, the OECD, and NATO struggled to overcome a legacy of cronyism, kickbacks, and bribes.
In Slovakia, the embassy scoffed at the firing of the minister of environment over a public procurement scandal, calling it no more than politics as usual. The case involved an €85 million public tender for the disposal of coal ash. The minister awarded the contract to a company that bid €27 million, almost 33 percent higher than the nearest competitor. Prime Minister Robert Fico had by then fired no fewer than nine ministers in the three-party coalition government, mostly over corruption. Still, the embassy was unimpressed. “The SNS (Slovak National Party) is the most egregiously corrupt and self-serving of the three coalition partners, and what Fico appears to object to is not so much the fact of SNS ministers’ cronyism as their sheer ham-fisted clumsiness, which rarely leaves more than a week’s respite between banner headlines.” 25
In the neighboring Czech Republic,26 Ministry of Defense (MOD) procurements were a mechanism of corruption, with successive governments using contracts “as a way to reward themselves and their political supporters with lucrative business deals, cheap asset sales, and kickbacks . . . Politicians appear able to manipulate the procurement process by utilizing single source tenders, requiring the use of preferred intermediaries, and paying higher prices than other countries for similar items.” 27
To paraphrase bank robber Willie Sutton, corrupt politicians target the MOD because that’s where the money is. With the second-largest budget in the Czech government, more than a quarter of the MOD’s funds in the late 2000s went to construction and procurement as it upgraded its Soviet-era equipment to meet NATO commitments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans. The shopping list expanded alongside the MOD’s addiction to shady deals, from parachutes that didn’t open to secondhand airplanes that kept breaking down. The embassy wrote that the 2008 purchase of 19 IVECO light multi-role vehicles (called Dingo 2s) epitomized the MOD’s procurement problems. Done as a sole-source purchase without a public tender, the Czechs paid $2 million for each vehicle. In contrast, the Norwegians paid only $385,000 for the same vehicle, and the thrifty Belgians paid only $220,000 each.28
The procurement scandals of the Czech Republic were closely tracked by the embassy in part because of the involvement of American-owned firms. One featured the dramatic arrest and prosecution of a former defense minister, the arrest of the American head of a renowned Czech truck company, and the in-court testimony of a former American ambassador. How did things get so out of hand? Two purchases—one for armored personnel carriers and another for army trucks—illustrate perfectly the endemic corruption.
The first deal involved a billion-dollar contract between the U.S. General Dynamics’ Austrian subsidiary Steyr and the Czech MOD for armored personnel carriers (APCs). A multi-year trail of venality began openly enough in 2004, when the center-left government approved a plan to replace Soviet-era vehicles with 240 new APCs (called Pandurs). The following year, a tender for 199 vehicles was let, and in 2006 the center-left government awarded the contract to Steyr. (The company’s subsidiary relationship with General Dynamics meant the U.S. embassy could advocate for the company as the only U.S. firm competing among seven others for the tender.) When the center-right party took control of the government in 2007, it repudiated the entire contract. General Dynamics threatened to take the case to international arbitration, and after intense negotiation, the government agreed to buy 107 Pandurs, subject to successful field testing and at a revised cost of $700 million, down from the original $1 billion original deal in 2006. The Czech army took delivery of the first 17 Pandurs in September 2009.29
The Czech press blew the whistle, charging that 6 percent of the Pandur contract was earmarked for payoffs to both political parties and implicating current and past government ministers. The embassy had reported in March 2009 that a General Dynamics/Steyr representative alleged that then–deputy defense minister Martin Barták had engineered an opportunity for a personal friend of the prime minister to solicit a bribe from Steyr in exchange for getting the contract issues sorted. The embassy felt it was important enough to warrant mention in another cable nearly a year later, noting that “although Embassy Prague is unable to confirm any allegations against Barták, the circumstantial evidence is considerable.” 30
Barták surfaced frequently in embassy reporting cables. A trained physician, he gravitated to the military and served as deputy defense minister under Vlasta Parkanová from 2006 to 2009, where he was seen as an adept manager, happy to run the day-to-day details for his less-experienced boss. (Parkanová later became a member of the Czech parliament, but in July 2012 the parliament stripped her of her parliamentary immunity to enable her to be prosecuted for corruption in connection with the purchase. She has not yet been charged.) Barták thrived at the ministry and finally got the top job under the caretaker government of Jan Fischer in 2009. A political survivor, he resurfaced in August 2010 for a third act as the deputy finance minister under Miroslav Kalousek.
The embassy’s reporting was only part of the story. Barták was later accused of bribery in a second deal, worth $150 million, for the purchase of several hundred heavy trucks from Tatra, a Czech company owned at that time by the U.S. firm Terex. Tatra was run by the American CEO Ron Adams, who also served as the president of the American Chamber of Commerce. A key member of the Tatra supervisory board was William Cabaniss, former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2004 to 2006. The Tatra truck deal ran into trouble when Praga, one of its suppliers, failed to provide parts for the large military order.
William Cabaniss created a media sensation in November 2010 when he went public, accusing Barták of soliciting a bribe in February 2008 at the Bull Run Public Shooting Center firing range in Centreville, Virginia. He told the same story in a Czech court on March 17, 2014, asserting that Barták said the problems Tatra was having with Praga could be fixed.31
“At some point in the conversation, [Barták] said: ‘For a certain amount of money’—I don’t remember the exact amount—‘the problems between Tatra and Praga can be solved.’ I didn’t respond, I thought it was a very unusual and out-of-order conversation for someone at the Defence Ministry, and I walked away and had no further conversation with him.” 32
Barták, perhaps sensing that the noose was tightening, played hardball. In August 2010, Tatra CEO Ron Adams was briefly arrested by Czech police on charges of bribery—charges allegedly brought by Barták. Adams was later released and charges were dropped.33
The 2014 trial of Barták brought out other allegations, including offers to arrange personal meetings—for a price—with the then–prime minister. The scandals swirling around him failed to scuttle an earlier Barták visit to the Pentagon for a meeting with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in September 2009. The United States had announced a month earlier that it was unilaterally canceling plans to install a missile defense program in the Czech Republic and Poland. The United States seemed eager, despite its knowledge of the defense procurement scandals, to secure continued Czech military involvement in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The years-long scandal ended, at least for Barták, in May 2014 when he was acquitted of all charges. CEO Ron Adams, also acquitted, left Tatra. The company fell into bankruptcy and was sold to Czech investors. The embassy, trying to explain what it acknowledged was “a mind-numbing number of corruption scandals,” despaired of any political consensus on how to end them, saying politicians thought the proposed cures were worse than the disease. Giving the police more power through witness protection programs, the use of undercover agents, and wiretapping were all tactics painted by critics as “a step backward . . . a clear effort to associate [reforms] to the excesses of the former Communist regime,” an objection that might well be true for many other post-Communist countries.34
ORGANIZED CRIME
“If it were not part of Italy, Calabria would be a failed state.” 35 Thus began a cable describing the last-place locale of Italy, located on the foot of the Italian boot, a region in thrall to the ’Ndrangheta, Western Europe’s largest and most powerful crime syndicate. The consul general, traveling through the region, described a bleak wasteland in which inhabitants had lost all hope.
And it seemed true not only for Calabria but for much of southern Italy. The consulate quoted a report from the Roman think tank Censis that called organized crime “a true national emergency” and asserted that 95 percent of the Naples population coexisted with active organized crime gangs, the highest percentage of any province in the country. The results were frequently fatal. Naples’s murder rate was more than thirteen times the national average: 2.6 per 100 residents in Naples, as compared to 0.2 for the country as a whole. Naples also had the highest rates of extortion, arson, and loansharking.36
The United States has a substantial presence in Italy, with a large embassy in Rome supplemented by consulates in Milan, Florence, and Naples. It also has a permanent mission in Vatican City and another to the UN agencies in Rome. There are several military installations, including the Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily, and thousands of accompanying family members. In addition, centuries-long immigration patterns have created countless Italo-American familial connections and an American awareness of (and fondness for) Italy that other countries envy. In a remarkable effort, the Naples consulate, covering everything from Naples southward all the way to Sicily, chronicled organized crime’s grip on Italian society. Over and over again, the consulate made connections between organized crime in Italy and security interests in the United States and articulated why the United States should be concerned and involved.
The Naples consulate described a criminal society with global tentacles. The three main players—Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta, and Campania’s Camorra clans—did business with Chinese, Turkish, and Balkan syndicates. According to a Calabrian-based anti-Mafia prosecutor, “The ’Ndrangheta is far more sophisticated and international than most people believe, maintaining bank accounts in Monte Carlo and Milan, and transporting operatives to Colombia, Spain, Germany, the Balkans, Canada and Australia.” 37 They had ties with Colombia’s FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), a leftist guerrilla group trading drugs for arms. The Italian parliament’s anti-Mafia committee characterized the ’Ndrangheta as “having an international structure similar to that of Al-Qaeda.” 38 In a public statement, Italy’s national anti-Mafia prosecutor identified links between Islamic militant groups and the Camorra, declaring that the evidence implicated the Camorra in an exchange of weapons for drugs with Islamic terrorist groups.” 39
FBI statements bolstered that viewpoint, noting numerous instances of “opportunistic interactions” between the Italian mobs and Islamic extremists, all of whom have members and/or affiliates in the United States.40 The post quoted an FBI intelligence assessment that “criminal interaction between Italian organized crime and Islamic extremist groups provides potential terrorists with access to funding and logistical support from criminal organizations with established smuggling routes and an entrenched presence in the United States.” 41
The consulate described the high costs of organized crime, which deters investment and leaves the formal economy in shambles, with unemployment rates in southern Italy of more than 20 percent and a GDP per capita of only half of the northern Italian regions. Criminal activities lead to higher costs for the government, business owners, and consumers, and it is harder to measure lost opportunities for foreign investment, environmental and health effects, losses due to corruption and inefficiency, and social costs related to higher rates of drug dependency and drug-related crime. Accounting for an estimated 7 percent of Italy’s GDP, organized crime is the single biggest sector of the Italian economy. The three biggest syndicates earned more than €57 billion a year tax-free, an amount that was equal at that time to Slovakia’s GDP.42
The consulate reported that the syndicates earned this income through protection rackets, drug trafficking, rigging of government contracts, trafficking in persons, loansharking, arms deals, illegal construction, distribution of pirated and counterfeit products, illegal waste disposal, and money laundering for all of the above.
Not even food is sacred. The post reported that the Camorra ran two thousand illegal bakeries
using expired flour and ovens which emit toxic fumes (the wood is often old doors covered in paint). Caserta, right in the heart of Italy’s cheese country, has illegal cheese factories which mix buffalo milk with powdered milk from Bolivia, cutting real mozzarella costs by a third; they also use lime [from limestone] to help ricotta keep longer. According to a commander of Naples’ Carabinieri, the most flourishing business is recycling expired products. The Camorra also passed off low quality imports with made-in-Campania labels, from pesticide-laden Moldovan apples to E.coli infested Moroccan industrial salt [as table salt].43
Even more repugnant is the Mafia’s waste disposal racket. Naples is infamous for its periodic garbage problems, and understanding why citizens would tolerate meter-high stacks of rotting garbage in a metropolitan area dense with more than four million is a lesson in how organized crime can bring a city to its knees.44 The post described how three “lacks” converged: lack of space in local landfills, lack of modern high-capacity incinerators, and lack of political will. “Particularly hard hit by the crisis is suburban Pozzuoli, just west of Naples, where garbage piles stretch as long as 200 meters. At one site, Roma children picked through a five foot high heap; at another, noxious smoke billowed from a massive pile.” 45
The consulate described how the Mafia became part of the problem decades earlier, when it learned there was money in toxic waste disposal—especially when done illegally. The Camorra earned $6 billion in two years by buying farmland at distressed prices and transforming it into illegal dumping grounds. “The type of garbage dumped includes everything: barrels of paint, printer toner, human skeletons, cloths used for cleaning cow udders, zinc, arsenic, and the residue of industrial chemicals . . . One dump was brimming with hospital waste, including used syringes, thousands of vials of blood samples and a human embryo.” Concerns abound about the garbage’s long-term effects on the underground water supply and aquifers for nearby crops, as well as more direct consequences on public health. The World Health Organization found cancer rates outside Naples were 12 percent higher than the national average.46
Organized crime has wormed its way into local politics, undermining any hope of a legislative fix. The cost of a vote was a $75 cell phone (to offer proof of a “correctly” marked ballot) until the Italian parliament banned the use of cell phones and cameras in voting booths. Considering that throwing an election in a multiparty system can hang on small percentages, the power of organized crime seems even greater. In interviews with numerous Italian pollsters and political observers, the post learned that the Camorra clan can move 10 percent of the vote in Naples province. The Cosa Nostra controls about 150,000 votes in Sicily, enough to determine whether a party crosses the 8 percent threshold required for a Senate seat. In some areas of Calabria, the ’Ndrangheta controls up to 20 percent of the vote. “By deciding who holds elected office, the mob creates a web of dependencies to ensure election victories for inept politicians that are guaranteed to produce policies favorable to organized crime.” The post continued, “It is clear from our meetings with elected officials in Calabria that they are a step down in quality from those in other parts of Southern Italy; some are so devoid of energy and charisma that it is hard to imagine them mounting—let alone surviving—a real electoral campaign.” 47
The United States has a further security interest in the region. Calabria is home to Gioia Tauro, Europe’s busiest transshipment port, where Department of Homeland Security employees work as part of the Container Security Initiative. The consulate offered many accounts of corruption at the port and ’Ndrangheta intimidation of both Italians and foreigners in the local communities. “The ’Ndrangheta controls the legal and illegal activities of the port, earning a commission on every container and controlling the hiring of personnel (even the guy who operates the access gate).” 48
The region hosts only a few American business interests and is losing opportunities for tourism. One cable noted that “the savvy general manager of one of the best hotels in the region has spent two years and over one million euros to obtain authorizations for a five star Marriott resort on the Tyrrhenian coast, but is still waiting for a ministry in Rome to move the necessary paper.” Infrastructure is missing too—the consulate reported in 2009 that the infamous Salerno–Reggio Calabria highway was still a construction mess twenty years after the project began, and the more ambitious Strait of Messina bridge to Sicily had once again been canceled.
The visiting consul general found the inhabitants enveloped in pessimism, disinterest, and resignation. Asked why the region had not adopted the anti-Mafia strategy of nearby Sicily, the regional president of Calabria responded, “We are the real island.” Asked why no one had made an effort to contact tour operators who were now bringing cruise ships to Sicily, the president of the province of Reggio Calabria asked, “What’s a tour operator?” 49
Antonio Lombardo, chief prosecutor of Catanzaro, the regional capital of Calabria, explained that the ’Ndrangheta’s family-based structure and lack of informants makes it nearly impossible to penetrate. Organized crime in Italy is not considered an emergency, he said, but rather “a stable factor in our country. We are accustomed to losing part of our GDP to organized crime and we factor it into our economic planning.” Adding a chilling note to the overwhelming sense of despair, the reporting officer wrote that the provincial president never spoke above a whisper.
Inevitably, comments from the citizenry led the consul general to broach the idea of complicity. How can organized crime maintain such a chokehold on business and political activities without the compliance of the wider society? One answer described a vicious cycle—in the absence of the state, the Mafia becomes the only alternative for services, employment, and protection. Another important institution, the Catholic Church, has come under criticism for decades, if not centuries, for looking the other way. But there are signs that things are changing. One bishop was under police escort in 2008 for refusing to preside at funerals for mafiosi.
The consul general interviewed a few brave souls willing to stand up to the ‘Ndrangheta. Calabria’s senior anti-Mafia prosecutor, Nicola Gratteri, under constant police protection, said what made him effective is that he realized he is “not afraid to die.” At the time of the interview, his investigations had led to the capture of one hundred and eighty mafia members, and he had eighty ongoing investigations. A few civil society groups have organized, including Addiopizzo (“Good-bye pizzo,” the Italian word for extortion payments). They put up fliers all over Palermo stating, “An entire people that pays the pizzo is a people without dignity.” Another group, Ammazzateci Tutti (“Kill us all”), is also run by fed-up young people, one of whom told the consul general that the group’s name is a message that expresses both hope and challenge, saying, in effect, “See if you have enough lead to kill us all.” 50
On the economic side, the consulate predicted that as citizens lose their tolerance for the fact that the price of a bottle of olive oil, a jar of tomato sauce, a bottle of wine—the staples of Italian life—has been inflated by organized crime, or the products have been adulterated by the same sources, their disgust with “the system” may take more tangible form. Culture matters too, and change will mean “breaking the culture of illegality that is so rampant in Southern Italy, that is, the blatant disregard for the law by average citizens and the lack of a sense of civic responsibility. The Naples chief prosecutor suggested—while lighting a cigar in a no-smoking office to underscore his point—that Neapolitans have ‘something in their DNA’ that causes them to react to any law by breaking it.” 51 Prosecutor Gratteri, despite his bravery, ended on a pessimistic note, saying, “As long as the human race exists, the ’Ndrangheta will exist.” 52
From New Jersey to Naples, from Spain to Sarajevo, organized crime is every bit as dangerous as terrorism. The pattern is similar, no matter the place. Criminal activities initially focus on businesses, but they soon leach into civic life. Mobsters buy corrupt politicians; they buy corrupt voters; and they finally buy elections. Losing patience with the time and effort needed to buy influence, they soon find it is simpler and more cost-effective to enter politics themselves, tapping unlimited campaign finance chests funded by their extortion and racketeering practices, completing a truly vicious cycle.
When this happens in Russia, it sets the stage for a country in which no amount of “resets” will make a difference. When this happens in transitioning countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, it impedes progress and wastes precious assistance funds. But when it happens in one of America’s closest allies, such as Italy, it is disastrous. Lest policymakers think such problems can be confined to Italy’s borders, reports from law enforcement suggest otherwise. Globalization has increased connections between markets. The ’Ndrangheta and its ilk are not coming to a town near you soon. Likely, they are already there.
GOOD (AND BAD) GOVERNANCE
While not every embassy or consulate took the enormous all-out reporting initiative of the Naples consulate, many invested time and effort translating corruption’s effects on the small, day-to-day actions of normal citizens, trying to convey to Washington the helplessness of an individual in a corrupt system.
When the Tajikistan government inaugurated sales of shares for its megaproject hydroelectric dam known as Roghun, there was nothing voluntary about citizens’ purchases. The embassy in Dushanbe reported that employers ordered staff to buy shares at rates that far exceeded their monthly salaries or risk dismissal.
National television larded the airwaves with footage of Tajik citizens clambering over each other to give their money to the bank. Happy stock owners recited poems about Roghun to the cameras as they proudly grasped their stock certificates. State media followed up with music video paeans to the dam, heroic images of Roghun builders, and aerial footage of a column of trucks on route to the construction site as if off to war. Images were straight out of Soviet central casting, including footage of President Rahmon in deep conversation with Roghun craftsmen, apparently discussing details about the masonry. Once could almost hear him exhorting, “Comrades, this grout must be thicker!” 53
The top-down approach included targeted amounts for everyone in Tajik society. At the bottom were students, forced to “volunteer” to buy 100 somoni worth of shares (roughly $20). Professors warned students that failure to present a share certificate bearing their full name would bar them from their exams. “As an added incentive, students could present their stock certificate for better grades. A certificate for 300 somoni in shares reportedly buys a ‘3’ (a passing grade roughly equivalent to a ‘C’ in the American system), while 400 somoni yields a ‘4,’ or ‘B.’ A student told us her professor told her not even to bother showing up at the exam; her 500 somoni contribution had already won her a ‘5.’” 54
Higher education figures frequently in corruption tales. A law school in Plze
, in the Czech Republic, began awarding degrees on a fast-track basis, challenging even the most liberal diploma mills in the United States. A joke made the rounds: “What are you doing this weekend? Answer: Getting a law degree.” The post reported that the story had all the ingredients of a classic corruption case: “potentially undue influence on state tenders, lack of transparency in school procedures, politicians and other well-placed individuals receiving special treatment, and allegations of involvement by organized crime.”
The story began when a student noticed that a vice dean had plagiarized a number of pages in his dissertation. The press quickly discovered that many politicians, police, and other officials and members of Mafia families had obtained law degrees without completing the five-year program. In some cases, degrees were awarded in just two months. Dozens of dissertations were “missing” from the law library (or were, in fact, never written). Embarrassed Czech alumni, several of whom held office, could not produce their dissertations and could not remember the names of their faculty advisors or professors. The president of the Czech university accreditation commission told the embassy she believed organized crime set up the entire system with the goal of controlling or blackmailing officials who had bogus degrees. To substantiate this allegation, she pointed to an analysis written by the law school’s vice dean and signed by the dean for an institute that provides expert legal advice to the government, which recommended that a $6.5 billion environmental cleanup project be treated as a concession and not as a more transparent public tender. This decision would have allowed the government to award the contract without opening it to public bidding. 55
Elsewhere, embassy officers tried to describe the frustration for the average citizens living in societies where corruption is the rule and bribery is not confined to public tenders and megaprojects. “Turkmen routinely pay bribes when obtaining a driver’s license, during stops by the traffic police, registering children for school or university, and registering a business.56 Turkmen doctors and nurses, forced by law to make house calls without the means to do so, pay bribes to the deputy heads of the clinics where they work to avoid paying stiff penalties. The heads, in turn, use the money to bribe health inspectors to make sure their reports are favorable. Laboratory workers also pay bribes, as do many hospital workers.57 This entrenched system stifles competition and public confidence, not to mention degrading the quality of health care. But nothing beats the surreal tale of one Turkmen village.
When Turkmenistan president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov opened a model village in fall 2009, there was plenty of hoopla at the brand-new school, hospital, mayor’s office, market, and apartment building. “Medical staff waved balloons and flags outside the hospital. Inside, they scurried around the halls and populated various offices. Berdimuhamedov toured the apartment housing and visited a family living in their brand new, well-appointed home.”
The embassy described the Potemkin aspect as follows:
One of the diplomats, who had accompanied the president on this visit, stopped by the village the following day when all the officials had left. She found a ghost town. The schools, mayor’s office, and most of the other buildings, including the apartment building where the family that hosted the president supposedly lived, were empty. The family was nowhere to be seen and their furniture was gone. The hospital director told the diplomat that his hospital was not really open, because he had no staff. The people, whom the diplomat had seen the day before, had come from other areas to play the part of hospital workers.58
It might be easy to dismiss corruption in out-of-the-way places, but Moscow, Europe’s largest city with almost twelve million inhabitants, makes other examples seem like child’s play. The embassy characterized former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov as the personification of an out-of-control spoils system. Luzhkov’s uniquely Russian brand of conservatism grabbed international media attention when he banned gay pride parades, calling them “satanic,” and plastered the city with posters of Stalin, refusing to be “an apologist” for a leader he admired.
Luzhkov, the embassy wrote, had “a national reputation as the man who governs the ungovernable, who cleans the streets, keeps the Metro running and maintains order. As a loyal founding member of the political party United Russia, he can also deliver the votes.” But, the embassy noted, Muscovites increasingly questioned their mayor’s links to organized crime. Some called the city “dysfunctional, operating more as a kleptocracy than a government.” The embassy described the intricate krysha (roof or protection) system that links organized crime, business owners, and several crucial public agencies: the police, the federal security services (FSB), Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), and the prosecutor’s office.
Getting much of their information from Russian journalists, the embassy officers contended that Moscow’s elaborate three-tiered structure placed Mayor Luzhkov at the top, the FSB, MVD, and militia at the middle, and ordinary criminals and corrupt inspectors at the bottom. Apart from its illegality, they characterized it as a highly inefficient system in which criminal groups filled voids in areas where the city did not provide services.
“Luzhkov oversees a system in which it is apparent that almost everyone at every level is involved in some form of corruption or criminal behavior,” the officers wrote. An investigative reporter said that having received enormous sums in protection money, Luzhkov, in turn, paid off key insiders in the Kremlin, ensuring his eighteen-year tenure, which began in 1992. “People often witness officials going into the Kremlin with large suitcases and bodyguards.” 59
While Luzhkov as a corrupt leader is hardly unique, the embassy described a complex structure of interlocking bribes that is uniquely Russian. The system runs through all sectors of society, including government, where most members of the Russian parliament buy their seats but quickly recoup their investment. “The lawless criminal climate makes it difficult for businesses to survive without being defended by some type of protection. According to that Transparency International’s 2009 survey, bribery costs Russia $300 billion a year, or about 18 percent of its gross domestic product.” 60
A Russian reporter told the officer how the system worked:
A cafe owner pays the local police chief via cash through a courier. He needs to pay a certain negotiated amount over a certain profit. The high prices of goods in Moscow cover these hidden costs. Sometimes people receive “bad protection” in the sense that the krysha extorts an excessive amount of money. As a result, they cannot make enough of a profit to maintain their businesses. Yet, if people forgo protection, they will instantly be shut down. For example, officials from the fire or sanitation service will appear at the business and invent a violation.
Everyone has bought into the idea of protection in Moscow, so it has become the norm . . . Business owners understand that it is best to get protection from the MVD and FSB (rather than organized crime groups) since they not only have more guns, resources and power than criminal groups, but they are also protected by the law.
The division of spoils has police and MVD collecting from small businesses while the FSB collects from the larger ones. “Despite paying for protection, nobody is immune; even rich people who think they are protected get arrested. The krysha system has led to an erosion of police internal discipline. Young police officers spend their money buying luxury vehicles that a normal worker could never afford.” 61
What seems extraordinary about corrupt systems is the symbiotic relationship between organized crime and officialdom. In the Russian case, the government officials maintain their own separate (but equally corrupt) identity. In contrast to the Italian protection rackets, official Moscow seems to have clear supremacy over the criminal element, which is relegated to lower-level functions.
Embassy officials wondered at what point Luzhkov and the system he personified would become a bigger liability than an asset. The cable noted mounting evidence that corruption had metastasized to a point that even those who benefited most could no longer defend it, and fate ultimately dealt with Luzhkov. The embassy began noticing numerous signs that his days were numbered, reporting that ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovskiy had called for Luzhkov’s resignation, saying his city government was “the most criminal in Russian history.” Such a remarkable denunciation, carried on state TV flagship Channel 1, was widely seen as an indirect Kremlin rebuke. Journalists and others willing to talk to the embassy agreed that Luzhkov was on his way out, one way or another. That day finally arrived on his seventy-fourth birthday. He was summarily fired by President Dmitry Medvedev, via long-distance decree, while Medvedev was visiting China.
Systemic problems require systemic changes, however. No single person, however corrupt, can be responsible for all the evils in a complicit system. Thus Medvedev also decided to take on the MVD, proposing a 20 percent cut in positions, higher salaries for those remaining, rotation of senior leadership, and a review of hiring and promotion practices. Like Luzhkov, the MVD had possibly exceeded the number of allowable scandals, with its leadership confessing to a shooting spree resulting in the murders of local residents, the torture death of a prominent lawyer while in pretrial detention, and YouTube postings by a former police officer chronicling widespread corruption in the ranks. The U.S. post noted that Medvedev was savvy in using these crises to manipulate public opinion against the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “The reputation of the police forces in Russia has been low for years, with Russian polling results depicting that more than two thirds of Russians distrust the police. It would probably take major reforms sustained over years before public opinion toward Russia’s police officers significantly improved.62
Of course, American businesses working in corrupt climates are not exempt from shakedowns. Any business that is slow or falls into arrears with any kind of payments can encounter trouble. This became a growing problem in southern China during the global financial crisis, when orders slowed and businesses of all kinds had difficulty making ends meet. The Guangzhou consulate reported an increasing number of cases in which American citizens were forcibly detained for owing money. The caseload peaked during trade fairs, when the numbers of foreign businesspeople in the country swelled.
“Extra-legal, strong-arm tactics are long established methods of resolving business disputes in southern China . . . Frequently the victim is threatened with violence by hired thugs and detained at a factory, hotel, or private residence until payment is received.” The consulate illustrated the lengths to which perpetrators will go. “Two Amcits [American citizens] and their Taiwanese business partner were forced from the road in Dongguan, a major manufacturing center in Guangdong’s Pearl River Delta. The victims were driven to a rural location and threatened with torture and death unless $4 million was transferred to a bank account in China. The suppliers transferred the money and the hostages were released the next day. We learned of the incident after the Amcit victims returned safely to the U.S. Their lawyer notified us that he had asked DOJ [Department of Justice]/FBI to help him work with Chinese authorities to investigate and prosecute the case.” 63
Two other cases offer clear examples of extortion. In one, an American citizen was detained by a group of men and threatened with violence at his factory in Xiamen. The victim was convinced his interlocutors were affiliated with organized crime and insisted that he had no connection with them. In a separate case, an American was held in his home until money was paid for his release. In both cases, local authorities assisted the American citizens in escaping only after telephone calls were made from the consulate. No arrests were made.
The consulate saw a clear link to globalization, noting that old customs die hard but will be increasingly exposed as China continues to court international investment. As foreign entrepreneurs pour into the country, there will be cultural clashes over their expectations of acceptable business conduct. The consulate also linked extortion to the global economic crisis. “As economic conditions deteriorate, business owners and factory employees grow more fearful that expected income will fall through. Weak enforcement of contract law was already a problem in China’s legal system; the economic downturn has worsened the situation. Under these conditions, it appears that the use of vigilante tactics to collect on debts is growing.” 64
While examples of corruption in Italy, Russia, and China are easy to envision, there are cases in smaller places that stretch credulity—both for their security implications and that they could have happened in the first place. One of the era’s sillier cases of corruption—but one with alarming possibilities—involved Slovakia’s Border and Alien Police and its senior officer at the Ukrainian border. An airport officer working a bomb detection exercise with sniffer dogs hid live explosives in the luggage of a Slovak who worked in Ireland. Incredibly, the officer failed to retrieve the package after the exercise. Through a series of errors the luggage made it to Dublin, where three days later the Irish police were able to track it down. The uproar spurred a secondary scandal in which the regional chief in charge of eight hundred and eighty police at the country’s most sensitive border—and a key embassy contact—was accused of accepting a bribe and abusing his public office. The post commented, “It would be surprising if an officer of [his] length of service just decided to begin a life of corruption now, given the well-known and lucrative smuggling of cigarettes and other contraband over the border from Ukraine. One newspaper reported that on the Ukrainian side, officers pay EUR 10,000 to secure a job on the border, which they swiftly make back.” 65
In a chapter full of incredible stories of other people and places, it seems appropriate to end with the most mind-boggling—an American private citizen’s impersonation of a U.S. member of Congress—a bit of mischief perpetrated on the unsuspecting country of The Gambia, a tiny West African nation. Business consultant Richard T. Hines, lobbying for World Air Leasing, which hoped to run transatlantic and subregional flights out of the capital, Banjul, hoodwinked the Gambian president into believing he was a member of Congress.
When the chargé d’affaires attended a large celebration for President Yahya Jammeh, she was shocked to see Hines sitting next to the president at the head table. Hines awarded the president a pin from the 82nd Airborne Division that he “happened to have with him at the time.” The Gambia’s newspaper of record carried a banner headline the next day stating “President Jammeh Receives U.S. Award for Fight against Terrorism.”
The embassy’s account of what it called a “surreal episode” is blistering in its condemnation of Hines’s “charade.” The chargé read Hines the riot act at breakfast the following day, and Hines and the World Air Leasing CEO left. The chargé then had to explain Hines’s ruse to the permanent secretary at the president’s office. The post reported that the official was grateful for the information but said he would not be advising President Jammeh of the problem—at least not right away. Passing the buck, he said that since the Gambian embassy in Washington had organized the trip, it would be up to the Gambian ambassador to write a letter to the Gambian government explaining what had happened. Perhaps wisely, he said he would only discuss the problem with the president after receipt of the letter.” 66 The 2004 episode came to light when the post (by then staffed with new personnel) was asked in 2007 to confirm the accuracy of a New York Times story that mentioned the Hines escapade.
CORRUPTION AS A SECURITY THREAT
For citizens in Western democracies, it is hard to imagine endemic corruption. While the U.S. has had some spectacular scandals (Enron, Madoff, etc.), most Americans still believe they can go to the post office and mail a package, reasonably confident that their money will not end up in the postal worker’s pocket. Most Americans get driver’s licenses, register their vehicles, and pay taxes with confidence that the various fees will be collected and credited. Students engaged in the annual rite of university applications are fairly sure that stuffing the envelope with extra cash will not enhance their chances. No one pays to be hired by the Department of Homeland Security thinking they will earn back ten times more through bribes.
The intensity of embassy reporting about how things work elsewhere did not seem to be matched by an intensity of interest on the Washington side. The Pentagon’s willingness to welcome the very tainted Czech minister of defense suggests an “unfortunate but inevitable” attitude, or a willingness to subordinate procurement irregularities to the higher priorities of keeping the Czech military committed to coalition activities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other stakeholders, including Congress, missed opportunities to engage the countries the United States most wanted to work with, including allies like Italy. They didn’t see how corruption made unreliable partners. And they clearly did not see how it posed a grave security risk to the United States. In countries where cooperation is for sale, promises mean nothing and vaunted partnerships are phony.
The rigidity of entrenched corruption kills the promise of possibility—of progress, investment, and justice. In the words of a Saudi interlocutor, “The lack of transparency, nepotism, tribalism all exist. I have no doubt that a corrupt official is just as much a terrorist as those that blow things up, considering the damage they inflict upon society.” He pointed to the Saudi justice system as a source of much discontent. “If I don’t feel my rights will be addressed in a system that is free of corruption there is something wrong.” 67