Browse column

Just over two weeks ago, everything seemed to have been patched up between the West and President Putin. Bush forgave the Russian president for his opposition to the Iraq war; Schroeder and Chirac kept mum on Chechnya as payback for the same deed. In return, Putin was supposed to agree to do America's bidding in Iran by canceling the planned Bushehr nuclear power plant.

Tony Blair, who was the first G-8 leader to court Putin over famous pints of beer back when Putin was still distrusted, went so far as to declare during the summit that Putin had already agreed not to ship nuclear fuel to Iran. Toasts were made, and everyone declared themselves satisfied.

But in the days since the summit pageantries ended, Russia has completely backtracked. It has now openly declared that it will indeed continue construction of the $1 billion Bushehr nuclear power plant and will send all the nuclear fuel it wants to Iran. What is going on?

As my colleague Pavel Felgenhauer pointed out, the first problem is that the Kremlin is no longer in control of the Iran nuclear issue. A shocking revelation to lay observers, but an obvious fact to anyone with inside knowledge. If the Americans want Russia to stop building the nuclear plant and therefore keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons, they're going to have to talk to the right person. But Felgenhauer failed to report who that right person is. This is largely due to the limits of his intelligence contacts. In Russia we have a saying: an analyst's intelligence sources are only as long as his beard. Pasha's beard is handsomely peppered yet far too trim to allow him access into the next layer of Russia's byzantine politics.My sources tell me that the key to understanding Russia's abrupt back-and-forth shift over Iran can be directly traced to events that occurred at the same time in one of our former Soviet republics, Latvia. Over the past several months, the Kremlin has constructed an extremely delicate and complex set of gives and takes with the West. President Putin is known to be a hard, scrupulous negotiator who does not simply give away concessions to the West for empty promises and photo opps. Therefore, Putin signed on to the following deal with Bush and Blair: in return for agreeing to allow NATO to expand into the Baltics, agreeing to the EU imposing visas on Kaliningrad residents crossing its territory to Russia, and for Russia canceling its $1 billion dollar nuclear reactor contract with Iran--in return, the West was going to agree not to manipulate the Eurovision song contest in such a way as to unfairly deny Tatu its expected victory. It was a hard-won victory for Putin, representing a leap forward for his vision of a Russia's return to power and influence on the world stage.

The West believes that it can still get its concessions from Russia without giving away any in return, as it did under Yeltsin.

To the surprise of Bush and Blair, the Russians are not taking the Tatu humiliation sitting down. State-controlled Channel One's spokesman Igor Burenkov called a spade a spade when he announced that the voting was "political" and "manipulated." There is no doubt about it either.

The manipulation, we know, took place in Ireland, which canceled its phone-in votes at the last minute and replaced it with a secret jury which then denied Tatu a single vote. What hasn't been revealed until now is who sat on that jury. My sources say that the jury was stacked with members of the infamous Defense Policy Board, the highly-influential Pentagon advisory group which spearheaded the war against Iraq. According to my sources, a hastily-assembled jury consisting of board members Richard Perle, Eliot Cohen, James Schlesinger, and James Woolsey were rushed to Dublin on a specially-equipped experimental Air Force jet which flies six times the speed of sound, skipping above the earth's ozone layer. The jury members were ejected from the mother ship in a pod, which landed safely in a field, skipping and crashing through a barn and stopping in a hay stack. The few Irish peasants who witnessed it reported that they had seen a weeping Virgin Mary emerge, and that she had lost most of her hair and put on weight.

Pages:     Previous   1 23 Next

Print   Share article