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What is John Bolton talking about? What is he ever talking about?

Okay, we get it. You don’t like the deal with North Korea. Why we needed another Wall Street Journal op-ed is beyond me.

This doesn’t, of course, mean I didn’t read it. Then I went for a walk in the sun to detox my brain.

Bolton has this idea that the North Korea deal will encourage other states to take advantage of poor little US. And they are all after the Bomb!

Instead, observers—especially Iran and other nuclear weapons aspirants—have witnessed embarrassing U.S. weakness on a supposedly unrelated issue, unmentioned in the Feb. 13 agreement. That issue involves North Korea’s widely publicized demand that approximately $25 million frozen in Macau-based Banco Delta Asia (BDA) ...

[snip]

The North’s access to international financial markets to launder its ill-gotten revenues is critical both to continued financing of its nuclear regime and to keeping Kim Jong Il in power. If this is even close to what the State Department is prepared to do, who will ever again take us seriously when we threaten financial strangulation of rogue states and terrorist groups? Granting this North Korean demand would make U.S. concessions on BDA look paltry by comparison.

Iran and other nuclear aspirants? Which other nuclear aspirants, exactly? By my count there is Iran, and well, Iran.

The other candidates are quite far from this point (in some cases technologically, in others politically) and their future decisions probably hinge on the macro-level outcome of the Iran and NK nuclear issues, rather than whether or not Wachovia is willing to handle a transaction or two.

(What’s Wachovia have to do with it? Patience, grasshoppers.)

Even if we are really talking about just Iran, then Bolton still misses the point. The “financial strangulation” has a lot less to do with U.S. credibility than it does with European and especially Russian hesitation over sanctions. The point is, how will rogue states take the U.S. seriously if it’s just the U.S. alone making the threats? But hey, Bolton was only Ambassador to the United Nations, so I’m sure he put a lot of thought into the roles of other states.

As for terrorist groups, I doubt they see loss of market access as a deterrent to blowing things up. See, they are terrorists.

Now, the Wachovia bit. Bolton is obsessed that the North Korea deal has some secrety side arrangement including US bankers (code word!), the Trilateral commission and the Illuminati. Well, at least one bank, Wachovia:

Third, we now face the nagging question whether there are other secret side deals beyond BDA. Of course, the BDA agreement was not so secret that Kim Jong Il was barred from knowing about it, by definition. Most troubling, however, is that State apparently thought it too sensitive to share with the American people until the February deal broke down in an unavoidably public way. But even this was not enough for North Korea, which, sensing U.S. weakness, continues to press for more. Although conflicting stories abound, North Korea may be seeking not just the return of the BDA funds, but something much more significant: guaranteed access to international financial markets, even through an American bank. Indeed, this week Wachovia Corp. confirmed that it had been approached by the State Department to assist in the transfer of funds.

It may just be all this time speaking Russian, but I don’t understand sentences like “Of course, the BDA agreement was not so secret that Kim Jong Il was barred from knowing about it, by definition.” Да, конечно!

On the Wachovia thing, the International Herald Tribune explained that “market access” meant the ability to transfer funds without loading a wagon train up with gold bullion:

An official familiar with the long-running dispute said earlier this month the communist government asked for permission to use an American bank to transfer the funds from the Banco Delta Asia bank in the Chinese territory of Macau.

[snip]

North Korea wants to use a U.S. bank because it believes the transaction would help secure its continued access to the global financial system, the official said.

Once the money is moved to a U.S. lender, it would be sent to a bank in a third country, perhaps Russia, he said.

Ok, so I am not convinced that North Korea won’t cheat on this deal as they have on others, or that they will freeze their nuclear program when they get that BDA money. But, compromise with NK is an option that needs to be tested. We need to know whether the NK nuclear program is at least somewhat negotiable on these terms.

Budging on $25 million is not a step so publicly conciliatory as to be forever irreparable in the eyes of future bad guys. Actually, I think the public nature of the “concession” on BDA could be a plus if NK does end up cheating. Members of the 6-Party Talks and other states would be able to see that a compromise approach was attempted but did not work. They may be more willing to accept and and actually enforce a harsher approach if it becomes necessary.

***

On a completely utterly unrelated note, the UAE may be planning to build a Death Star under the guise of a conference center.

Comment [7]

Michael Roston adds to the list of reasons that John Bolton was a lousy Undersecretary of State—apparently he held up efforts to secure Iraqi scientists after Operation Iraqi Freedom:

Regular readers of Arms Control Wonk know that the pro-international institution critics of John Bolton pursued the wrong strategy in blocking his confirmation. By playing up inconsequential instances of personal dispute between him and colleagues or underlings, or snarling remarks he made at the expense of the United Nations, they ignored the blunderbuss of Bushian bluster—that Bolton is an effective diplomat with “vast experience in foreign policy…integrity and…willingness to confront difficult problems head-on.” How could we oppose having an ambassador to the UN with such a record of success?

The truth was that Bolton was a disaster for American nonproliferation policy in his position as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. While this blog has raised awareness of Bolton’s wrecking ball routine on US-Russian cooperative threat reduction and other important nonproliferation activities, another chapter in Bolton’s record of failure has only now fully surfaced. As we watch Bolton implement the Bush administration’s strategy to obstruct meaningful United Nations reform, it is worth adding to the record another instance that shows we had plenty of warning of this man’s craven ineffectiveness, his willingness to sacrifice sound policy to unswerving ideology.

At the end of the Iraq war, Bolton sat astride a Proliferation Threat Reduction Office of the Bureau of Nonproliferation at the State Department that was eager to take on a critical mission. The State Department had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars since the 1990s containing the same threat from the former Soviet Union. With Saddam’s regime out of the way, thousands of weapons scientists were now unemployed and unmonitored. These individuals, knowledgeable in the manufacture of chemical weapons and with technical expertise relevant to biological and nuclear weapons, represented a major proliferation danger. Bolton’s warning in June 2003 that “The biggest threat that we now face from Iraq’s defunct WMD program is … that other rogue states or terrorist organizations will hire and offer refuge to these WMD experts” marked the first public acknowledgment of the danger by an administration official, and was echoed briefly in President Bush’s nonproliferation strategy speech before the National Defense University in 2004.

Indeed, Bolton’s seeming prescience on this danger in 2003 was confirmed in the report of Charles Duelfer to the CIA on the search for WMD in Iraq. Buried deep in an appendix of the report’s third volume was the Iraq Survey Group’s discovery that a group of Iraqi terrorists, the “Al Abud network” had employed a civil Iraqi chemist to attempt the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons to use against Coalition forces. But the threat was not limited; the report frighteningly highlighted that Al Abud is “not the only group planning or attempting to produce or acquire CBW agents … availability of chemicals and materials dispersed throughout the country, and intellectual capital from the former WMD programs increases the future threat to Coalition Forces.”

Before any of these statements had been made, Bolton’s staff were already moving quickly to transfer their expertise at securing Soviet weapons know-how, and easily saw the possibility for a $20 million program to be kicked off in late 2003 to assist Iraqi weapons scientists. Meanwhile, the Cooperative Monitoring Center at Sandia National Labs worked with Energy Department officials to promote a $50 million program to support both civilian and weapons scientists as agents for the reconstruction of Iraq.

But, the time since Bolton made his statement in 2003 has seen no serious action on the part of the United States. No more than $2 million in emergency Nonproliferation and Disarmament Funds have “been spent by the United States to secure the deadly know-how possessed by the thousands of engineers and scientists who worked in Saddam’s weapons programs.

As with so many things, Bolton was in the middle of the trouble. In the September/October issue of Mother Jones, journalist Kurt Pitzer quotes David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security as stating, “All of this was going to land on Bolton’s desk…he was in the camp that thinks all these scientists are criminals.?”

We shouldn’t be surprised, and we already had our suspicions. In February 2004, in an address at the US Institute of Peace, I asked David Kay, who had previously worked in Duelfer’s job, why it was that no considerable amount of money had been spent on re-employing Iraq’s WMD scientists. His response was candid and cut to the quick, noting that the proposed program had been held up by “some of the worst … most pointless inter-agency wrangling I’ve ever seen.”

It’s not clear who was driving the policy to “exploit” weapons scientists, which both Duelfer> and Kay publicly acknowledged was driving Iraqi scientists into hiding, and thus possibly into the arms of would be proliferators and WMD-users. But Albright’s public statement confirms at last that Bolton certainly wasn’t fighting for the saner policy of earning the trust of WMD scientists, one that has its empirical basis in the World War Two-era.

[See also, Arms Control Wonk on 5 May 2005 ]

As usual, where this hard charger “confronting difficult problems” was involved, effective public policy took a backseat to ideology. And until January 2007, whenever we hear “pointless inter-agency wrangling” referred to in State Department-related affairs, let’s know that two words are involved: John Bolton. UN reform will wither on the vine and we can say these same two words once again.

Michael Roston is organizing The Mister Ambassador Project, an initiative of the Human Rights Working Group at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He blogs at Looking for Someone to Lie to Me

On the l’affaire du J-Bolt, check out Steve Clemons’ breaking news on Bolton’s efforts to post a friend to the UN. I think Steve’s being unfair—after all, Steve has Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner. Doesn’t J-Bolt deserve a lap dog, too?

Comment

One of Laura Rozen’s readers at War and Piece asks a stunningly simple question about the effect of John Bolton on the “New York Channel” with North Korea:

Recent days have seen the “New York channel” used to great success to provide some hopes of reviving the Six Party Talks and bring North Korea back to the table. [snip] Predictably, Administration hardliners have wanted to shut this down, afraid that our State Department negotiators are implicitly promising concessions to the DPRK during their talks there.

So what happens when John Bolton gets confirmed and heads up the U.S. Mission to the United Nations? He may well seek to assert his authority as head of mission to outright block those meetings from occuring in the first place. Alternatively, if Rice puts her foot down and insists that they still take place, Bolton could well torpedo them anyway simply by insisting that he be present (and it would be hard to prevent the U.S. Ambassador to the UN from sitting in on a meeting occuring at his mission.)

I wonder if Condi has a very short leash to match that Dominatrix get-up?

Comment

Gordon Mitchell argues that John Bolton’s handling of intelligence in the Niger Uranium intelligence should preclude his confirmation as Ambassador to the United Nations:

Impeccably accurate IC reporting won’t matter a whit if political operatives ignore official intelligence reports and use Bolton-style B-teaming to back favored policies. Bolton’s confirmation would give political operatives throughout the administration the green light to B-team, to skirt the established procedures for vetting and validating the intelligence data underwriting U.S. foreign policy. Raymond McGovern, who spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, during which he chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared and briefed to senior White House officials the President’s Daily Brief, spells out the upshot: “For integrity in intelligence is now on life support. Approving the nomination of quintessential politicizer Bolton would pull the plug and ensure amateurish, cooked-to-taste intelligence analysis for decades to come.”

Gordon’s arguments are part of a public debate with Daveed Gartenstein-Ross.

Daveed—in a very odd move—has chosen to base his defense of Bolton on the claim that Iraq did attempt to procure uranium from Niger—or, at least, the claim that this was a reasonable belief when Bolton put it in a December 2002 State Department fact sheet.

You may remember that the claim was eventually revealed to be based on forgeries, prompting Condi Rice to admit that “it was a mistake for this [claim] to go in” the State of Union.

Daveed argues that the forged documents don’t undermine the claim because they “were not the only data points” in the Niger reporting. Daveed doesn’t, however, mention what the other data points were—because they don’t exist.

The WMD Commission reports “the CIA concluded that the original reporting was based on the forged documents and was thus itself unreliable.” The original Niger claim was reported by a foreign intelligence service, which presumably also passed the source documents to an Italian journalist at Panorama. The Foreign Intelligence Service was probably the Italians, although they blame the French.

Moreover, Daveed asserts Britain’s spies “continue to stand by the claim.” This is awesome: he links to Cliff May at the National Review—but not the Butler Report, presumably the source of May’s claim. The Butler Report conditions Britain’s stand on the fact that “The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.”

[I’ve added a longer digression in the comments regarding the varying proximities “by the claim” to which Britain’s spies have stood.]

That protection is, of course, not available to Mr. Bolton who had the documents. Put simpy, Bolton knew the claim was bogus, but used it anyway.

This may explain why the State Department covered-up Bolton’s role in creating the fact sheet.

Comment [7]

John Steinbruner shares his thoughts on John Bolton, in an Arms Control Wonk exclusive:

It is reasonable to see the Bolton nomination as a small but potentially significant episode in what will ultimately have to be a more general reckoning.

As usual Bolton’s conservative supporters have so far framed the issue to their advantage: the peculiar details of his individual personality. They depict him as a tough patriot and thereby play to the tidal emotions that have engulfed the American political system in the aftermath of the September 11 events. If the question is restricted to personal characteristics, one can expect the nomination to be confirmed after a carefully negotiated measure of diligence has been displayed.

There are much more fundamental issues looming in the background, however, that would presumably sink the nomination if they are engaged. The extent to which they are engaged will be a practical test of whether the American political system is yet prepared to deal with issues of accountability and judgment that, let us all hope, will eventually have to be confronted.

The issue of accountability is superficially visible in the specific charges that have been raised about private intimidation of intelligence officials and public distortion of their assessments. Dedicated defenders of the appointment can be expected to denigrate the victims, perhaps citing some variation of Harry Truman’s famous quip: “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” Indeed the details of the charges do not appear to suggest criminal abuse, but that is hardly the point. The relevant fact is that the United States initiated war against Iraq on the basis of an indictment that was false and could reasonably have been known to be false at the time. Bolton is not the most culpable of the officials who did that, but he is among the more flamboyant. If accountability first descends upon him, he will have nothing to complain about.

The issue of judgment has not yet been prominently mentioned and probably will not be, but it is at least as serious. John Bolton certainly appears to be a person obsessively driven to prove – presumably to himself – how tough he really is. People of that sort should not be trusted to wield the instruments of power for they will assuredly abuse them. The United States ambassador to the UN does not directly wield major instruments of power, but the incumbent in that position does represent those who do. This is not the person for that position. It is very important for the United States to convey to an increasingly doubting world that it is in our interest and within our capacity to apply higher standards of judgment.

Comment

The Brits don’t like Bolton, either.

Newsweek has dusted off some quality reporting on the diplomacy surrounding Libya’s decision to surrender its nuclear weapons program. In October 2004, Michael Hirsh and John Barry of Newsweek reported:

LIBYA. “We convinced Libya to disarm,” Bush said. But in fact the British played the lead role in the negotiations. And the talks succeeded only after the British managed to sideline the Bush administration’s top arms-control official, John Bolton, NEWSWEEK has learned.

Under Secretary of State Bolton, a hard-liner, pursued Bush’s basic approach of “not rewarding bad behavior” by refusing to lift sanctions against Libya. But after a tense session in London, the British complained that Bolton was obstructing talks. Washington agreed to keep Bolton at home. The assurances that Libya sought were quietly given. Bush lifted sanctions.

ACW passed along the morsel at the time (along with a delicious photographic comparison of Mssrs. Bolton and Gaddafi, if I do say so myself).

Now, Hirsh has revisited the story, adding that the intervention occurred at the “at the highest level” on the British side.

I guess Tony Blair doesn’t support the nomination, either.

Comment

ACT editor Miles Pomper has an article coming out later today which (I think) addresses this issue in a bit more depth, but I thought I’d pass along the following tidbit.

Biden stated during Bolton’s hearing last week that the text of Bolton’s famous Cuba/BW speech that has been the subject of some controversy originally “called for international observers of Cuba’s biological facilities.”

Of course, it would help if there were any such observers. But there aren’t because J-Bolt saved us all from global tyranny by putting the kibosh on the BWC verification protocol.

Strong work.

Updates:

1. Here’s the article.

2. Previous ACW coverage from 18 September 2004, 20 September 2004, and 19 October 2004.

Comment

I wrote about this around a month ago, but thought I’d raise the issue again.

Why didn’t the SFRC ask about Bolton’s role in composing the December 2002 State Department fact sheet that stated—for the first time—that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger?

Comment

Has any Senate hearing witness ever before used the phrase “ream him a new one?” Sweet.

Amazing what passes for good news these days.

Comment

The anonymous “Mr. Smith” from the Bolton hearings, if I understand Senators Kerry and Lugar correctly, is Fulton Armstrong, National Intelligence Officer for Latin America since June 2000.

Here is Armstrong’s bio from an archived copy of the NIC website (as of December 2003):

Fulton Armstrong
National Intelligence Officer for Latin America

Fulton T. Armstrong was appointed National Intelligence Officer for Latin America on 1 June 2000. Previously Mr. Armstrong served as Chief of Staff of the DCI Crime and Narcotics Center (CNC). Prior to that, he served two terms as a Director for Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council (1995-97 and 1998-99) and as Deputy NIO for Latin America (1997-98).

Mr. Armstrong began his government career in 1980 as Legislative Assistant and Press Secretary to US Representative Jim Leach. In 1984-95, he served as analyst, political-economic officer, and manager specializing in Latin America in the both the intelligence and policy communities.

Prior to joining government, Mr. Armstrong worked four years as a reporter, editor, and translator in Taiwan. He earned his B.S. in Linguistics and Spanish at Georgetown University in 1976. He is fluent in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.

Insight on the News reported at the time that Armstrong was coordinating Bolton’s talking points for the speech in question—so I don’t understand why we are using a pseudonym.

The Insight... story is interesting because it suggests that Bolton was pushing for a very, very hawkish assessment on Cuba:

In his gagged statement, a copy of which was obtained by Insight, Bolton expresses “frustration” at the apparent unwillingness of U.S. intelligence agencies to disclose information about Cuba’s biological weapons which could include anthrax, smallpox and variants of encephalitis such as West Nile virus. Recent outbreaks of West Nile virus that have killed more than 30 Americans and infected another 675 have been traced to birds that may have been infected at Cuban bioweapons labs, according to defecting scientists who report Fidel Castro’s experiments using animals as carriers of weaponized germ agents.

Wow. Does that really imply that Bolton wanted to pin West Nile on Castro? Or, is Insight... just engaging in the old tactic of placing statements next to one another to imply a relationship?

Late Update: Let me be clear about this: Senators Kerry and Lugar said nothing new by mentioning Armstrong’s name.

• The Washington Times-owned Insight on the News identified Armstrong as the NIO who was “coordinating” Bolton’s speech in September 2002.

• The New York Times published a story about efforts by Otto Reich to pressure Armstrong in January 2003.

• A Wall Street Journal opinion piece accused Armstrong of a “lackadaisical approach to a mounting body of disturbing evidence” about threats to the United States from Cuba and Venezuela in March 2003.

• Salon mentioned Armstrong, again by name, as an analyst who had been smeared as ” somehow under the influence of the Cuban government” in January 2004.

Senator Lugar—according to my transcript—opened the hearing by announcing:

Now, staff has in fact interviewed Mr. Westerman; Carl Ford, who will be appearing before the committee, as I understand, tomorrow morning at our hearing at 9:30; Mr. Fred Flights (ph), the Bolton special assistant who might know something about this; Tom Fingar, the INR principal deputy assistant secretary at the time; Fulton Armstrong, national intelligence officer for Latin America at the NIC at the time; Stuart Cohen, Mr. Armstrong’s supervisor at the NIC at that time.

Later, Chris Dodd suggested there was something untoward about mentioning Armstrong’s name and everyone played along with the ridiculous “Mr. Smith” charade until Kerry read Armstrong’s name in a transcript.

Even later update: Anne Gearan, AP Diplomatic Writer, should be ashamed of this paragraph:

Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., both mentioned a name, Fulton Armstrong, that had not previously come up in public accounts of the intelligence flap.

Other than the four that I cited, she means.

Comment [5]