by Paul R. Hollrah, Lincoln Heritage Institute Senior Fellow
During the summer of 1992, Bill Clinton trailed George H.W. Bush and H. Ross Perot in all the major head-to-head polls. By comparison, he was an absolute novice in foreign affairs and he needed something to help him establish an image as a “player” on the international stage. By coincidence, Russian President Boris Yeltsin was then in the midst of a high profile tour of the U.S. and Clinton asked for and received an audience with the Russian leader. It was just what the campaign needed.
As Strobe Talbott explains in his book, The Russia Hand, “Before his presidency, Clinton’s (foreign policy) claims extended to no more than an Oxford essay on the possibilities of political reform in the USSR, and an early trip to the country.”
That storied trip took place in the summer of 1969 when Clinton and Talbott, Oxford roommates, traveled together to Moscow. It was on that trip that Talbott was recruited by Victor Louis, the KGB’s infamous “talent scout,” leading him to become the Kremlin’s “most trusted friend” in Washington. Then, in the early 1970s, Talbott returned to Moscow as a correspondent for Time Magazine. It was during those years that he became closely allied with an up-and-coming Yeltsin partisan named Anatoly Chubais.
Shortly after his inauguration in January 1993, Clinton named Talbott, who had acquired a reputation as something of a Russia “expert,” as Ambassador-at-Large to Russia; while in Russia, Chubais had been given the Herculean task of privatizing all of the country’s previously state-owned enterprises. Talbott and Chubais were suddenly the glue that cemented the Clinton-Yeltsin relationship.
However, that relationship would soon become a bit more complicated. As Yeltsin wrote in his memoir, Midnight Diaries, “In late 1996, after Clinton’s reelection, Russian intelligence (SVR) sent me a coded report containing a prognosis of how the Republicans would resolve the major political problems emerging for them.…In the near future, the report said, Clinton’s enemies planned to plant in his entourage a young provocateur who would spark a major scandal capable of ruining the president’s reputation…”
When asked in an interview with the Times of London if he knew the identity of the woman (Monica Lewinsky) before it was disclosed in the Drudge Report on January 19, 1998, he replied, “I knew.”
The difficulty with Yeltsin’s recollection is that the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was already a year old, their first sexual encounter having occurred in the Oval Office on November 15, 1995. Also, there has never been any informed speculation that Lewinsky was a Republican plant. Meanwhile, in Russia, the “privatization” program had become a major scam in which Chubais and his friends became instant billionaires. By early 1997 the looting of state enterprises was so complete that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) refused to approve the billions in loans needed to avert economic collapse. Desperate measures were required if Yeltsin and Chubais were to escape with their political hides intact.
Informed speculation has it that Yeltsin then told Chubais of the SVR memorandum regarding Clinton and Lewinsky. Chubais called Talbott to Moscow for a meeting on March 5, 1997, and informed him that, if the multi-billion dollar IMF loan was not approved (one-fifth of it coming out of the pockets of American taxpayers), he was not sure he could “keep the lid on” the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Talbott returned to Washington and shortly thereafter Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who had been unalterably opposed to the approval of the IMF loans, suddenly began referring to Chubais and his fellow looters as a “dream team” for their “superb” handling of the Russian economy. The IMF loan was quickly approved and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair remained a secret until shortly after Clinton suborned Linda Tripp’s perjury and Matt Drudge broke the story.
So how did Larry Summers and the IMF “get religion” so quickly? On what basis did Clinton worry out loud to Lewinsky, three weeks after the Talbott-Chubais meeting, about “a foreign power listening in” on their steamy telephone conversations? If Clinton knew about Yeltsin’s SVR memo, who told him? And how might the rehash of this sordid affair have an impact on Hillary’s presidential ambitions?
It is reasonable to assume that Talbott did what most men would do; he told his wife the juicy story about the president’s sex life. That scenario becomes even more probable when we realize that Talbott’s wife was none other than Brooke Shearer, one of Hillary Clinton’s closest friends and, at that time, head of the White House intern program. Monica Lewinsky was Bill Clinton’s lover, and Strobe Talbott’s wife was Monica Lewinsky’s boss.
So, was the President of the United States blackmailed by the Russians? And did Hillary have a hand in forcing a blackmail payoff involving billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars? It is an interesting speculation.
Lincoln Heritage Institute • lhi@wmis.net
Clinton Yeltsin bump