Vast oil reserves and geographic proximity to Afghanistan have made Kazakhstan an important Western energy and military ally in the past decade, but few observers have any illusions about its corrupt, despotic ruler. President Nursultan Nazarbayev has led the country since it became independent of the Soviet Union, and in 2011 he was reelected in a rigged balloting with 95 percent of the vote. A rubber-stamp legislature has exempted him from a constitutional two-term presidential term limit, which effectively makes him president for life. Nazarbayev has been granted the permanent right “to address the people of Kazakhstan at any time” and to approve all “initiatives on the country’s development,” according to a US State Department account.
The WikiLeaks release of US diplomatic cables in 2010 comically undermined the sober public images cultivated by the Kazakh ruling elite. One waggish dispatch called “Lifestyles of the Kazakhstani Leadership” begins by dryly recounting that political leaders in the former Soviet republic “appear to enjoy typical hobbies—such as travel, horseback riding, and skiing.” But then the cable goes on to observe that the country’s oil-besotted leaders “are able to indulge in their hobbies on a grand scale, whether flying Elton John to Kazakhstan for a concert or trading domestic property for a palace in the United Arab Emirates.” As a representative study, the cable notes that in 2007:
President Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, celebrated his 41st birthday in grand style. At a small venue in Almaty, he hosted a private concert with some of Russia’s biggest pop-stars. The headliner, however, was Elton John, to whom he reportedly paid one million pounds for this one-time appearance. (Note: The British Ambassador relayed a slightly different story, with an unknown but obviously well-heeled friend arranging and paying for Sir Elton’s gig.)
Kazakhstan sits at the heart of the Caspian Sea region, in Central Asia, and the WikiLeaks cables paint the same rough portrait of other energy-rich nations of the region. In one diplomatic missive, a US diplomat compares Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev to Sonny Corleone. Like Don Vito’s kid, Aliyev was prone to overreact when he perceived challenges “to his authority or affronts to his family dignity, even minor ones,” said a 2009 cable, in a reference to the president’s tendency to lock up critics and shut down newspapers. As the dispatch explained, “He typically devises [foreign policy] with pragmatism, restraint and a helpful bias toward integration with the West, yet at home his policies have become increasingly authoritarian and hostile to diversity of political views.” Another WikiLeaked cable from January 2010 said that observers in Baku, the capital,
often note that today’s Azerbaijan is run in a manner similar to the feudalism found in Europe during the Middle Ages: a handful of well-connected families control certain geographic areas, as well as certain sectors of the economy … As a result, an economy already burgeoning with oil and gas revenues produces enormous opportunity and wealth for a small handful of players that form Azerbaijan’s elite.
In a series of cables on the most influential families in Azerbaijan—titled, with refreshing candor, “Azerbaijan: Who Owns What?”—an embassy hand notes that the country’s first lady has managed a sort of trifecta in phony civic achievement: Mehriban Aliyeva, née Pashayeva, “besides being the wife of the President, is a Member of Parliament1 and head of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, a nontransparent organization that bills itself as a vehicle for charitable works.” The cables closely examined the economic power of Aliyeva, whose family has vast interests in banking, insurance, construction, telecommunications, and real estate, not to mention owning Baku’s first and only Bentley dealership.
Things get less decorous from there. “The Pashayev women are known to be fashion-conscious and daring, far more so than the average woman in majority-Muslim Azerbaijan,” we learn. And then, with the word-mincing prelude out of the way:
Mehriban Aliyeva appears to have had substantial cosmetic surgery, presumably overseas, and wears dresses that would be considered provocative even in the Western world … On television, in photos, and in person, she appears unable to show a full range of facial expression.
The first lady’s reconstructive work also created an issue of some delicacy when second lady Lynne Cheney arrived for a state dinner in September 2008. Flanked by her two daughters, Aliyeva didn’t immediately present herself as the matron of the trio, so the crack embassy staff had to make some quick calculations in order to tell the Secret Service whom to introduce to whom. “Emboffs”—embassy officials, in cable jargon—“and White House staff studied the three for several moments, and then Emboff said, ‘Well, logically the mother would probably stand in the middle.’ ”
There are also various illuminating cables from Uzbekistan, another former Soviet republic now run by an autocratic clan. One cable from 2005 recounts the story of a powerful first daughter who is looking to burnish her public image. The Uzbek press, the cable writer informs us, has lately run an “unusual series of articles promoting the virtue and selflessness of Gulnara Karimova,” who is said to harbor ambitions of succeeding her father (perhaps best known internationally for gunning down and periodically boiling alive his political opponents).
But the strategy doesn’t seem to be taking. “Most Uzbeks see Karimova as a greedy, power-hungry individual who uses her father to crush business people or anyone else who stands in her way,” said the cable writer. In one interview with an Uzbek paper, the dispatch continued, Karimova portrayed herself as “a highly principled person who listens to her conscience [and] went so far as to say that people treat you the way you treat them, and if you don’t treat others well, you will ‘find yourself in a blind alley.’ ” The correspondent then archly noted: “The many people crushed by Karimova would likely relish the chance to catch her blind in an alley.” Even with the press campaign to improve her image, Karimova’s “charm offensive will not likely make her more popular; she remains the single most hated person in the country. (Comment: We have no polling data to support that statement, but we stand by it. End comment.)”2
Nor do the subtler protocols of a foreign political order escape the discerning eye of a properly trained US embassy official. In the staggeringly grim republic of Turkmenistan, one cable notes somewhat ruefully that given the rampant state of official bribery in the capital city of Ashgabat, “US anti-corruption laws [add] a new layer of complexity and uncertainty for US firms wishing to do business here.” Another Wikileaked dispatch, meanwhile, handicaps the prospects for enhancing public trust under the rule of President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov as dim indeed. “Berdimuhamedov does not like people who are smarter than he is,” this cable writer relates. “Since he’s not a very bright guy, our source offered, he is suspicious of a lot of people.”
Despite this dark landscape, Caspian rulers have had few problems lining up support in Washington. “The oil and gas reserves of … Caspian littoral states can ensure the energy needs of the entire world within the next 200 years,” Ali Hasanov, a senior Azeri official, said in 2012. Hasanov was surely overstating the case—that year the Caspian produced only 3.4 percent of global oil supply and Saudi Arabia alone has more proven oil reserves—but there’s no doubt about the region’s growing importance as a global energy supplier.
Like other corrupt, ruthless foreign regimes, Caspian leaders have hired up numerous lobbying and PR firms to peddle themselves to the American public and policy makers. But lobbying is subject to disclosure laws, and hence in recent years foreign governments and interests seeking influence in Washington have increasingly turned to other means, which are largely unregulated and don’t always require public disclosure. These include: making contributions to think tanks, universities, and nonprofit groups; setting up business associations that advocate for better political ties with the US but aren’t legally defined as lobbying organizations; and offering huge consulting contracts and speaking fees to politically prominent Westerners. These financial flows have helped recruit many prominent Western cheerleaders, including retired politicians (and their offspring), corporate titans, college professors, think-tank fellows, and countless former senior government officials, who use their experience and connections to promote the oil industry’s interests in these countries and advocate for closer ties to the US.
Few have donned the pom-poms with as much vigor, or made as much money, as former British prime minister Tony Blair, whose work in Central Asia is just a small component of the burgeoning business realm he’s built since resigning from public office in 2007. Blair moved to cash in on his time as prime minister almost immediately upon departing from Downing Street. Records on file at the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA), a British government agency, show that he signed on with the Washington Speakers Bureau in October 2007, four months after he stepped down, reportedly netting a $600,000 signing bonus. The records show that he gave his first paid speech that same month, though whom he addressed is not disclosed.
Blair is available to speak on any of sixteen topics, ranging from the global economy and human rights to emerging markets and overcoming obstacles and challenges, and generally “offers an unparalleled analysis of the world’s most difficult and complex issues.” Unlike the case with most speakers represented by the bureau, no information is provided about what it costs to hear Blair provide his pearls of wisdom. The Web site says only that fees “vary based on location and inquiries should be made to the WSB.”
But one can get a sense of his standard fee by consulting the Web site of the All American Speakers Bureau, another agency that at one time represented Blair (and which still advertises his services). All American puts Blair in its category of Celebrity Headliners and pegs his minimum fee as $200,000. That’s twice the rate demanded by Donald Trump, four times higher than for comedian Don Rickles and ten times higher than for Leah “Coco” Fort, “the developer of the four-step process to personal success known as the Coco Conversion.”
In December 2008, he established Tony Blair Associates (TBA), “which will allow him to provide, in partnership with others, strategic advice on both a commercial and pro bono basis, on political and economic trends and governmental reform.” Through TBA, Blair uses his Rolodex to provide door opening services to clients, and also takes a cut on future deals. It’s not entirely clear what he does in exchange for the stiff fees he receives. A 2009 story in New York magazine listed Blair as an example of what the writer called “letterhead hires” and “invisible men.” Such hires, the author continued, “enjoy a fairly carefree existence”:
Often, they’re sent around the world as emissaries for their employer, tasked with giving speeches and schmoozing clients, and occasionally asked to pull out their Rolodexes to nudge a well-placed contact on some deal or regulatory issue. The job title given to a letterhead hire is often “senior adviser,” and while the post can be more involved than being a board member, it’s less taxing than being a day-to-day manager. Letterhead hires typically have no direct reports, no live deals, and rarely interact with the rank and file. (I once told a junior JPMorgan Chase banker that I’d seen his “co-worker” Tony Blair, the former British PM turned JPMorgan adviser, on TV. His response—“Tony Blair works here?!”—tells most of the story.)
Blair is also an envoy for the “quartet,” the Middle East peacemaking group consisting of the US, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union, and he’s established three nonprofit smiley face initiatives: the Faith Foundation, which “aims to promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions”; Breaking the Climate Deadlock, which works to “bring consensus on a new and comprehensive international climate policy framework”; and the African Governance Initiative, which is “underpinned by the principle … that effective governance and political leadership are essential for delivering the public services and nurturing the thriving private sector that will create sustainable development,” according to those groups’ Web sites.
No one knows for sure just how much money Blair has made, but the Financial Times estimated that in 2011 alone he raked in at least $30 million in speaking fees and for advising governments and corporations. He and his wife own seven homes, including a £40 million (approximately $64 million), seven-bedroom property once owned by Sir John Gielgud. Blair’s transformation into a human cash register has outraged many in Britain, and all the more so as he continues to collect a pension and allowance for a private office that costs taxpayers more than £122,000 (approximately $200,000) per year. Blair’s “love of money” has brought about his complete “moral decline and fall,” Nick Cohen wrote in a column in the Observer.
Blair isn’t the first prime minister to cash in after leaving Downing Street. His predecessor John Major took a senior position with the American private equity firm Carlyle Group, and Margaret Thatcher netted $500,000 (about £305,000) in consulting fees from Philip Morris. But they were far more discreet and restrained than Blair in their business dealings, and both seemed more interested in political and private pursuits than in getting rich. Major in particular kept a low profile and dedicated much of his time to his greatest passion, cricket, even joining the executive committee of the organization that makes and reviews the rules of the game.
But Blair hasn’t gotten heat just because he discovered that getting rich is glorious. Major and Thatcher were Tories and advocates of untrammeled capitalism, so their commercial activities didn’t carry any whiff of hypocrisy. Blair moved the Labour Party to the right, but he criticized Conservative Party free-market excesses, writing (in 1996, the year before he became prime minister) that Tory promises of an “economic miracle in which income and wealth would trickle down from the top and benefit the rest of us” had instead left “a growing number of people at the bottom without work and often without hope.”
Blair’s friend and political doppelgänger Bill Clinton (estimated net worth: $38 million) is also making huge sums of money from speechifying and consulting, and he and his foundation have also taken money from an assortment of dubious sources. But even Clinton has been slightly more discerning in picking clients. He made introductions in Kazakhstan for Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra; Blair, as we’ll see, went directly on the Kazakh regime’s payroll.
Rachel Grant, a spokeswoman for Blair’s office, defended his pecuniary activities in an e-mail she sent me:
There is nothing “inappropriate” about how Mr. Blair makes his money. Paid speeches are a completely routine way of former leaders earning money, and the speeches are mainly done through the Washington Speakers Bureau. He will also regularly donate the proceeds to charity … As for consultancy, again this is done by many former people in senior positions, and all the work carried out is done in accordance with best business practice.
The businesses help support the charity side. In the past few years Mr. Blair has given significant amounts of his income to the charities, in addition to the whole of the proceeds of his autobiography … He spends approximately two thirds of his time on pro bono work—charity and of course his role as Quartet Representative.
Yet it’s not always clear which hat Blair is wearing while traveling the globe, or if he’s leveraging his allegedly humanitarian ventures to grease the wheels of his business activities. Consider, for example, his dealings with Muammar Gaddafi. Blair formed a personal friendship and geopolitical alliance with the colonel during his years as prime minister and held six private meetings with the colonel after leaving Downing Street.3 “He kept in touch with Colonel Gaddafi after he left office and visited a number of times,” Rachel Grant told me. “But he also constantly urged reform of Libya’s system and to get it to open up.4 His last visit was in 2009, and he had not visited in the two years before the uprising. He has never made money from Libya, and when Gaddafi attacked his own people last year, Mr. Blair made it clear he fully supported the action to protect the Libyan people against those attacks.”
But what exactly were his meetings with Gaddafi about, and on whose behalf and dime did they take place? Grant told me rather vaguely that the meetings were “primarily on the subject of Africa,” so maybe he went to Tripoli for the African Governance Initiative? Or, since he wrote a note to Gaddafi on Quartet letterhead after one meeting, perhaps he went to discuss Middle East peace? Or, as sources told the Telegraph, maybe he was there “sounding out deals for JPMorgan”? Yet another possibility is that he was scoping out deals for Tony Blair Associates, since after one 2008 meeting he wrote Gaddafi to thank him for his “hospitality during my visit to Libya and for taking the time to meet with me” and to emphasize that he was “particularly interested in what you said about the funds that will be dedicated to projects in Africa, since you know I am doing a lot of work there and know of good, worthwhile projects for investments.”
Or maybe Blair met with Gaddafi for all those reasons? It’s impossible to know.
For a man who made quite a fuss calling for transparency while in government (i.e., promoting the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative), Blair is remarkably nontransparent about his personal moneymaking. He discloses little about his clients, contracts, or income, and TBA itself has no Web site and is entirely unmentioned on the Web site for the office of Tony Blair.
Blair has set up a complex, deliberately opaque corporate structure that makes it impossible to know how much money he’s making or precisely where it’s coming from. His lawyers and accountants established eight separate corporate entities to handle his business affairs, two of which are limited partnerships that don’t have to publish their accounts. “What has our former prime minister got to hide?” asks Richard Murphy, an accountant and founder of the London-based Tax Justice Network. “Whatever it is, he’s willing to spend good money to keep it hidden.” Blair has thus far declined to accept a peerage that he is entitled to as a former prime minister, which Murphy suspects owes to the fact that he ’d have to disclose his income to the House of Lords if he does so.5
Whatever one thinks of his politics, Blair as prime minister delivered some memorable speeches. However, the huge sums that he currently commands are something of a mystery. In style and delivery he is so boring as to make a stuffed shirt like Mitt Romney sound like Malcolm X, and the content of his private sector lectures are stunningly banal and pedestrian. “When things are in the balance, when you cannot be sure, when others are uncertain or hesitate, when the very point is that the outcome is in doubt; that is when a leader steps forward,” he observed in a 2008 speech in Beijing. At a conference on Africa last year he said that there was “something wonderful, vibrant and exciting” about the continent’s culture and traditions, and, speaking of economic development, helpfully pointed out, “With electricity, given the technology we now have at our fingertips, everything is possible. Without it, progress will be depressingly slow. Likewise with roads and often ports.”
From scanning public accounts it appears that Blair’s most lucrative speaking gigs came in March 2009, when he traveled to the Philippines and raked in more than $600,000 for two short speeches. He thereby pocketed over the space of about sixty minutes what it took him two years to gross as prime minister.
Blair gave the speeches during a thirty-six-hour visit to the Philippines, where he traveled by private jet and where he also may have achieved the apex of his oratorical banality. The first talk, called “The Leader as Nation Builder in a Time of Globalisation,” was sponsored by a telecommunications company and held at a luxury hotel in Manila. “Politics really matters, but a lot of what goes on is not great,” Blair told the audience. Other insights: “Politicians are a very strange people”; religion can be “a source of inspiration or an excuse for evil”; and “helping people is a noble profession, but not noble to pursue.”
A second talk, held at Ateneo de Manila University, was titled “The Leader as Principled Negotiator.” One account by a person in attendance quoted scintillating observations on religion (“The most important thing is to get people together”); globalization (“The most important thing is … [to] have a driving commitment to justice”); Obama (the main problems he faces “are essentially global in nature”); and education (“In my view, [it] is what will make the difference in the future”).
Another memorable speech of Blair’s was delivered in 2007 in China, for which he netted £200,000 from the Guangdong Guangda Group, a local real estate company. Blair spoke to a group of businessmen, government officials, and clients of his host at a “VIP banquet” in the industrial city of Dongguan. During his speech, titled “From Greatness to Brilliance,” he said, “The reason I am in Dongguan now is because I was told that everything that was happening here was amazing. If you keep a forward-looking attitude and keep an eye on what lies ahead, Dongguan’s future is immeasurable.” As Blair likes to do in his speeches, he made sure to insert a reference to his personal “connection” to the country where he was speaking. In this case he did so by noting that his young son, Leo, was studying Mandarin at school.
Blair’s twaddle infuriated Chinese newspapers, which said his empty remarks showed he was only interested in “digging for gold” and “money-sucking.” A writer in China Youth Daily skewered Blair, writing:
Frankly, we are very familiar with all this—it’s just like listening to any county or city official’s reports. Why pay such a high price to hear the same thing? Is it worth the money? Do these thoughts multiply in value because they come from the mouth of a retired prime minister?
Blair’s consulting work has also been quite lucrative and has required the same limited exertions as his speaking gigs. The first deal that Blair closed after leaving Downing Street, according to disclosure records he filed with the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, was inked in late 2007 with JPMorgan Chase, which reportedly pays him $3 million annually. The firm appointed Blair as an adviser to CEO Jamie Dimon and to the company’s senior management team. Blair would be “drawing on his immense international experience to provide the firm with strategic advice and insight on global political issues and emerging trends,” said a press release issued by the company at the time. The statement said Blair would also “participate in select events and conferences for the company, including senior-level client events, and will provide briefings on political trends to the firm’s Board of Directors.”
Little is known about Blair’s work at JPMorgan. The Telegraph newspaper has reported that he used his post at the Quartet to promote two contracts in Palestine with British Gas and mobile phone firm Wataniya, both of which are JPMorgan clients.
Much of Blair’s known consulting work has been for energy-rich governments or oil companies. For example, the government of Kuwait reportedly paid his firm £1 million to advise it on governance in December 2007 and £27 million (about $44 million) on a second contract signed three years later to conduct a broad review of the Kuwaiti economy.
One suspects that the huge fees are due in large part to the gratitude Kuwait’s royal family feels for Blair, due to his support for the overthrow of its archenemy, Saddam Hussein. Blair has also forged a close relationship with the emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Al-Sabah, who made an official visit to Britain (and met the queen) shortly before Blair left office.
Blair traveled to Kuwait for the Quartet in September 2007, just ten weeks after stepping down as prime minister, and the royal family held a banquet in his honor. He was back in Kuwait on another Quartet mission that December. One can surmise that he was also negotiating personal business while there, because, also in December, he reported to ACOBA that the Kuwaitis had offered him a job as an adviser on governance. He took up the post the following July, though it was more than another year before the committee disclosed the contract. Blair says he kept the deal secret at the insistence of the Kuwaitis.
Blair was again in Kuwait on Quartet business in January 2009 and was accompanied by his former aide Jonathan Powell. That’s curious, because Powell didn’t work for the Quartet, though the following month he was put on the payroll at TBA as a senior adviser.
At some point between then and December 2010 (when accounts appeared in the press), Kuwait gave TBA its huge contract to conduct a review of its economy and to produce a report, “Kuwait Vision 2035,” examining the kingdom’s political and economic future. Blair has denied the media accounts saying his firm received £27 million; he says the contract was for quite a bit less than that, though he won’t be more specific. And because the deal was handled by the emir’s personal office, it was exempt from any oversight by Kuwaiti agencies.
When asked by Channel 4 why Blair’s firm got the deal, a former finance minister replied forthrightly, “He’s very popular. For us he was a great guy to support the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime.”6 Nasser Al Abolly, a Kuwaiti prodemocracy advocate, told the network that the price for Blair’s work was “exorbitant” and that his report was unoriginal and made recommendations similar to those in previously commissioned (and cheaper) studies.
In August 2008, according to British news accounts, Blair was retained (for an unknown fee) to advise a consortium of investors led by the UI Energy Corporation, a South Korean oil firm with major interests in Iraq. He convinced ACOBA to keep the deal hidden for nearly two years due to “market sensitivities.” Blair claims that his advice is unrelated to business in Iraq and that the South Korean firm had demanded the secrecy. The deal was finally disclosed when ACOBA grew weary of Blair’s continued requests to keep it hidden. Members of Parliament were not pleased when they learned of the deal in 2010. “This doesn’t just look bad, it stinks,” Tory Douglas Carswell told the Daily Mail. “It seems that the former prime minister of the United Kingdom has been in the pay of a very big foreign oil corporation and we have been kept in the dark about it. Even now we do not know what he was paid or what the company got out of it.”
Liberal Democrat Norman Baker added: “These revelations show that our former prime minister is for sale—he is driven by making as much money as possible. I think many people will find it deeply insensitive that he is apparently cashing in on his contacts from the Iraq war to make money for himself.”
He’s certainly cashed in handsomely in the Caspian, including in Kazakhstan, which has reportedly paid his firm at least $25 million since 2011. Blair, incidentally, developed a friendship and close working relationship with President Nazarbayev while serving as prime minister. When the Kazakh leader came to London on a state visit in 2001, he was famously photographed holding baby Leo in his arms as a beaming Tony looked on proudly.
A Kazakh source familiar with Blair’s local endeavors said that as part of his deal, the former prime minister is expected to help buff Nazarbayev’s “personal image … in the international arena.” And Blair has buffed away. He has publicly spoken of the Kazakh leader’s political “reform program” and appeared in a dreary neo-Stalinist–style propaganda video called In the Stirrups of Time, which was produced by a Kazakh satellite channel and released in 2012. It featured extensive interviews with Nazarbayev and Western energy executives praising him, as well as fawning interventions from Blair, who says that the Kazakh dictator had displayed “the toughness necessary to take the decisions to put the country on the right path.” At another point he chimes in, “In the work that I do there I’ve found them really smart people, capable, determined, and proud of their country.”
Rachel Grant would not comment on Blair’s fee in Kazakhstan, but she said he was “well aware of the criticisms made of the Kazakhstan government but would point out that there are also visible signs of progress in Kazakhstan that mark it out in the region: Over the past twenty years, GDP reached double-digit growth with impressive impact on social indicators; it has renounced its nuclear weapons, something President Obama praised in his press conference recently with President Nazarbayev; it is a majority-Muslim country of religious tolerance and one of the few to have built a synagogue in recent years; and it has played a key role in supporting the allied effort in Afghanistan.”
This justification seems entirely self-serving and elides key facts. Kazakhstan’s GDP has grown, but that’s been entirely on the basis of its huge energy reserves. Corruption is still rife, and governance issues have worsened, not improved. And while it’s nice that Nazarbayev renounced nuclear weapons (back in 1991, not a new development) and built a synagogue, these issues have nothing to do with demonstrating his government’s commitment to “reform.”
Indeed, on the topic of the government’s “reforms,” it’s not clear what Blair or his office is referring to. In June 2012 Human Rights Watch issued a report that detailed “significant setbacks” in Kazakhstan’s record, including the use of criminal charges for “inciting social discord” (which carries a maximum sentence of twelve years in prison) against a number of civil society activists. The report also highlighted police and military violence against striking oil workers and their supporters in December 2012—several months after Blair began working in support of Nazarbayev’s alleged reforms—when twelve unarmed protesters were shot dead.
Furthermore, even if Blair is indeed promoting reform, he’s also helping market the Kazakh regime. As part of his deal, Blair’s office put together a team of international advisers and consultants “to boost the reform program.” Exactly who is on this team is unknown, but it includes personnel from Portland, a London PR shop that signed up to work for Nazarbayev last year, and whose senior officials include several of Blair’s former top aides.7
Blair has also done well for himself in Azerbaijan, though in that case it was a one-off speaking event in 2011 that netted him about one hundred thousand pounds from Nizami Piriyev, one of the wealthiest men in the country and the owner of a methanol manufacturing company called AzMeCo. Piriyev has extensive holdings and political contacts across Central Asia and in Russia and the Middle East.
While in Azerbaijan Blair expressed upbeat views about President Aliyev, describing him as a leader with a “very positive and exciting vision for the future of the country.” During his speech he shilled for Piriyev’s newly opened methanol plant with a mix of green platitudes about “sustainable” and “responsible” growth and shameless name-dropping: “I had this conversation with Al Gore about the environment, where Al says to me, ‘When there is a will, there is way.’ But I always say to him: ‘It is easier to have a will if you show that there is a way.’ So this AzMeCo plant shows that there is a way!”
Blair clearly knew little about the topic he was speaking on and seemed to be mouthing lines fed to him by his local handlers. “I’m not a technical expert,” he said. “I have got my lesson earlier, and as I understand, the first phase will be natural gas to methanol, then the second phase will be purge gas, which produces a by-product that will then be turned to urea and ammonia. And then the phase three will be the methanol derivatives. Have I been a good pupil?”
He even found time to praise formaldehyde, a by-product of methanol’s industrial process (and a human carcinogen). He marveled: “To be honest, until I looked at the list of what formaldehyde does, I had no idea of how many parts of my life was governed by the existence of this thing. When I go back home, I will tell to my nine-year-old boy: “Stop all other studies and concentrate on formaldehyde and you will be fine!”
Azeri oppositionists were disgusted by Blair’s appearance, especially his failure to note (or even allude to) the regime’s record of human rights violations and political repression. During a trip to the Azeri capital of Baku in July, I met Hikmet Hajizadeh, who runs a prodemocracy think tank. In 2010, his son Adnan was sitting in a restaurant with friends when thugs burst in and viciously beat him, yet it was he who was charged with “hooliganism” and spent more than a year in jail.
The entire affair was a regime put-up job. Adnan’s real crime had been to produce (along with a friend, Emin Milli, who was jailed on the same charges) a satirical video that made fun of the regime, for importing donkeys from Germany at about twenty thousand dollars a head, and suggested that either the deal was corrupt or the officials involved were no smarter than the mules they bought. “In terms of political freedom, it’s like Brezhnev’s Soviet Union here, but the government wants to impress Western investors,” Hajizadeh told me. “That’s why Blair was brought in. His speech was just for PR.”8
Blair’s work for Caspian dictators is hard to square with his rhetoric as prime minister. Back then he was an ardent champion of protecting democracy and human rights, which he cited in urging British military action against Slobodan Milosevic and in joining America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a speech a few weeks after 9/11 he said there could be “no more excuses” for dictatorship and corruption, and called on Britain to “follow the principles that have served us so well at home—that power, wealth, and opportunity must be in the hands of the many, not the few.”
Former prime minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin, whom Nazarbayev forced into exile in 1997, is dismissive of Blair’s alleged effort to bring democracy to the country. “He can offer all the advice he wants, but you can’t have better governance in Kazakhstan without changing the government,” he told me, during an interview in London.
Mike Harris, a Labour Party critic of Blair, said this of the former prime minister: “Previous prime ministers have made money on the international speaking circuit and from their memoirs, but to go and take a large contract from the autocratic leader of a foreign state as an adviser is a different matter entirely … He’s deluded if he thinks that dictatorships will open up and develop into democracies through his counsel.”
So what drives the former prime minister? “Blair is transfixed by money,” Peter Oborne, chief political commentator for the Daily Telegraph, told me. “This sort of behavior is more common in America, where the culture is more commercial and presidents—in particular Bill Clinton—have acted in a financially unscrupulous fashion after leaving office. But for a British prime minister, Blair’s profiteering is unprecedented in scale and shamelessness.”
For Oborne, Blair’s dodgy corporate setup, combined with his “long and proven track record of making false statements in matters great and small” (most famously but not limited to his allegations in regard to Saddam Hussein’s alleged stockpiles of WMDs), make it impossible to take him at his word about his current earnings. “He has a history of being economical with the truth, so anything he says about his personal finances is not entirely credible. It might be true and it might not.”
John Kampfner, a former editor of the New Statesman, believes that Blair is motivated by fame as much as cash. “Blair loved being on the world stage, and then he was forced out of office against his will,” told me. “His business deals allow him to remain on the stage and continue to hobnob with the rich and powerful.”
Tony Blair has not gone so far (at least yet) as to promote the Uzbek regime of Islam Karimov, a Soviet-era hack in power since 1991. But while Uzbekistan does not have official lobbying representation in Washington, it has many American friends advocating on its behalf—and because they don’t register as lobbyists, it’s hard to know exactly what they’re up to. Chief among them is the American-Uzbekistan Chamber of Commerce (AUCC), whose board is made up of executives from US companies with interests in Uzbekistan, such as Boeing, Honeywell, and General Electric. The group’s stated purpose, as described on its Web site, is to “promote trade and investment,” but it also pushes for “strong ties” between the two governments on the basis of its “excellent working relations” with both.
The AUCC is chaired by attorney Carolyn Lamm, a former head of the American Bar Association who in the past has lobbied for such authoritarian states as Libya and the former Zaire, when it was ruled by strongman Mobutu Sese Seko. Between 1997 and 2005 her law firm, White & Case, lobbied for the Karimov regime. Lamm has also served as legal counsel of Zeromax, a Swiss-registered holding company widely reported as controlled by Gulnara Karimova, the president’s powerful daughter. (The one described in the WikiLeaks cable as “the single most hated person in the country.”)
Following the 2005 Andijan massacre—in which Uzbek security forces slaughtered hundreds of unarmed protesters—the AUCC’s then president, James Cornell, wrote to then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice urging her to “not rush to conclusion or ignore the thorough investigation carried out by the government of Uzbekistan,” and said that downgrading relations with Karimov threatened “several vital interests of the United States.”
In 2011, AUCC board members and the Uzbek ambassador to Washington held a briefing with House Foreign Affairs Committee staffers. During their meeting they talked up “job creation” linked to American exports to Uzbekistan and “offered their help, expertise, and knowledge” for future congressional visits there. In September of the same year the AUCC held its annual business forum in Washington, which was attended by representatives of “international financial organizations, think tanks, and policy institutions” and featured speeches by Uzbek and US government officials. AUCC president Tim McGraw of NUKEM—the aptly named company that serves as an intermediary between uranium producers and nuclear energy utilities—told the crowd that his group’s efforts sought to “fundamentally strengthen the overall bilateral relationship.”
The same day, in what was surely no coincidence, President Obama spoke with Karimov by phone and “pledged to continue working to build broad cooperation between our two countries.” This was just four days after a Senate committee, at Obama’s request, voted to waive Bush-era restrictions on military aid to the Karimov dictatorship in exchange for its help moving military supplies into Afghanistan.
My request for an interview with Lamm, made through the AUCC, was declined. Elena Son, the organization’s executive director, told me, “The AUCC asked the US government about the waiver for informational and better awareness purposes.” The chamber, she said, was “not a lobbying organization” and its “advocacy efforts aim to inform the American public and governing institutions about why better bilateral relations with the Republic of Uzbekistan matter to US geopolitical and business interests.”
Among the speakers at AUCC’s business forum was Professor S. Frederick Starr of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute (CACI) at Johns Hopkins University, who has been a reliable champion of Karimov and other former Eastern bloc tyrants. Following the 2005 Andijan massacre, Starr went on NPR and echoed Karimov’s justification of the crackdown as necessary because Islamic militants were behind the demonstration. CACI later cosponsored an event (along with the Hudson Institute) that debuted a short video offering the Karimov regime’s take on the Andijan crackdown. An account of the event at EurasiaNet.org said that Starr “sought to undermine” critical reports about Andijan by saying journalists “had an anti-government agenda” and “were lying.”
CACI does not disclose its donors, but over the years, an Institute brochure I obtained shows, they have included a number of US oil companies active in the region as well as Newmont Mining, which at one time had big interests in Uzbekistan; and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Caspian governments have funded individual scholars at CACI, which also boasted in the brochure about the Institute of its “close contacts with the Washington embassies of the various countries in the region.”
In his approving comments about Caspian governments, Starr—an adviser on Soviet affairs to presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush—sounds like one part old-line Soviet apparatchik and one part Borat. One former student of Starr’s told me that he became notorious in the classroom “for his predictable whitewashing of each and every central Asian despot”—even Saparmurat Niyazov—the former leader of Turkmenistan who built a cult of personality to rival Stalin’s, and who named himself “Turkmenbashi the Great.” So ardent was Starr in talking up Niyazov that students took to calling him “Starrmenbashi.”
Starr has been just as big a fan of Turkmenistan’s new leader, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, who won office in 2007 with 89 percent of the vote in an election following his predecessor’s death. “I am in complete amazement from everything I have seen here!” the State News Agency of Turkmenistan quoted Starr as saying while touring the country in November 2010.
In 2011, Starr gave a talk at CACI in which he lauded Berdimuhamedov’s commitment to openness and technology. This was less than two months after Turkmenistan had shut down the country’s largest mobile network. Starr also praised Berdimuhamedov’s books—which include a two-volume opus on medicinal plants—which he said had allowed him to “understand the logic of the current unprecedented successes of the Turkmen government.”
In a reply to a request for comment, Starr said that the purpose of his trip to Turkmenistan
was to conduct research on a book on the eighth to the eleventh century, to visit archaeological sites connected with that work and to consult with several scholars who have conducted research on the period in question. My trip was paid for by CACI, which receives no money from Turkmenistan or any firm working there, and by me personally.
Starr has also sallied forth on behalf of Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbayev. In 2008, CACI published three upbeat reports on economic and political developments in the country without mentioning that the Kazakh government had paid for them through one of its Washington lobbying firms, APCO Worldwide. Starr has even helped whitewash Kazakhstan’s bogus 2004 parliamentary and 2005 presidential ballotings, as an “election observer” sent by the International Tax and Investment Center (ITIC), which is headquartered in Washington and has offices in Kazakhstan.
The ITIC is headed by Daniel Witt, a former vice president of Citizens for a Sound Economy, the predecessor organization to Dick Armey’s conservative pro-business group Freedom Works, which helped spur the Tea Party. Though it claims to be an “independent” research center, ITIC’s sponsors include numerous oil companies with stakes in Kazakhstan, as well as the Kazakhstan Petroleum Association. The group’s Web site even carries an endorsement from Nazarbayev. “ITIC has always insisted upon complete academic freedom for our observers,” Witt told Transitions Online Newsletter, which reported on the organization’s observer role.
While independent observers have ridiculed Kazakhstan’s periodic elections, Witt and ITIC’s expert teams invariably find them to be expressions of the popular will. For example, in 2004, one of the trips on which Starr served as an observer, Witt noted “vigorous and competitive activities by political parties” in what he called the “most open and competitive vote in the history of independent Kazakhstan.”
Bilateral business groups like the AUCC have become an especially favored means for foreign governments and American oil companies to gain favor in Washington. For example, the departed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who Ronald Reagan once described as “the mad dog of the Middle East,” came in from the cold under President George W. Bush and counted on support from the Washington-based US-Libya Business Association (USLB). That group was founded and financed by US oil companies that were unhappy about the pace at which the Washington–Tripoli relationship was developing after Bush’s administration forged a rapprochement with Gaddafi’s regime in 2004. Despite the political thaw there remained strong opposition in Congress to Gaddafi’s regime due to his past support of terrorism. Meanwhile, European governments had been far less squeamish about embracing the colonel, giving their oil companies a leg up on American firms in the race to win concessions in Libya.
To supplement their stable of K Street lobbyists dedicated to improving ties with Tripoli, Occidental, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Marathon Oil, Chevron, and other companies set up the USLBA. According to its federal tax filings, the association sought to “educate the public on the importance of US–Libya trade and investment, and facilitate the commercial and diplomatic dialogue between the two countries.” At least seven of its eight directors were registered lobbyists for oil companies.
David Goldwyn—who had served at the Energy Department under Bill Clinton, and who then ran a consulting firm that provided “political and business intelligence” to oil companies—was hired to head the group. The USLBA spent over $1 million between 2006 and 2009, of which more than six hundred thousand dollars was used to pay Goldwyn’s firm. In February 2007, the USLBA brought together government officials from both countries at a gala dinner, held at the Charlie Palmer steakhouse, to honor a senior official of “The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.”
The following year, Gaddafi demanded that American oil companies help Libya win an exemption from a law signed by President Bush that allowed American victims of terrorism to seize assets of countries found liable for attacks. Libya was a specific target of the law. The USLBA was happy to help out. Working in close collaboration with official lobbyists for Libya and the oil companies, the association urged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to pursue a waiver for Libya, as first reported by Bloomberg. Rice and three other Bush cabinet members soon wrote congressional leaders saying that the exemption was needed or there would be “a chilling effect on potentially billions of dollars in investments by US companies in Libya’s oil sector.”
Congress soon passed a measure that gave Libya the immunity it sought. Goldwyn, meanwhile, took a business delegation to Libya in December 2008 and talked about the “fantastically warm reception” they received from senior government officials.9
Goldwyn also served as director of the US-Turkmenistan Business Council, which was also primarily funded by American oil companies (Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon) hoping to do business in the country. The staff included Diana Sedney, a Chevron lobbyist. The USTBC’s program included “briefings with staff members from relevant House and Senate offices”; “lunches and dinners in honor of visiting dignitaries from Turkmenistan”; and to generally “educate the public about progressive changes in Turkmenistan.”
But did any “progressive” changes take place in the country under the inspired leadership of its new ruling dentist? Very little, based on news reports and independent observers. “Politically motivated harassment, detentions and imprisonments continue unabated in Turkmenistan despite the government’s promises to uphold human rights,” Amnesty International reported in 2011. Turkmenistan remains “one of the most repressive and authoritarian states in the world,” Human Rights Watch said the same year. “Its policies and practices are anathema to European values.”
The Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights, which is headed by Farid Tukhbatullin, a former political prisoner who now lives in Vienna, has also detailed regime abuses. “The new president talked about reforms, but it’s been mostly cosmetic,” he said. “All the schools feature his portraits and quotations from his speeches are prominently displayed. The education system is still mostly about ideological indoctrination.”
Berdimuhamedov’s ascension to power has been an “emotional blow” to the exiled opposition, Tukhbatullin said. “Niyazov was very old and there was hope we could outlive him,” he said. “The new president is relatively young; he may outlive us.”
Goldwyn joined the Obama administration in 2009 as the State Department’s coordinator for international energy affairs. He resigned two years later and returned to the private sector as an energy consultant. Goldwyn declined a request for comment about his work for Libya other than to say, in response to a question about why he had never registered as a lobbyist for the USLBA, that he was not legally required to because he didn’t spend sufficient hours to trigger the disclosure rule.