Questioning a star witness in the Senate campaign finance hearings, Republican Susan Collins of Maine announced she wanted to ask questions about “the now-famous Bob at the CIA.”
Bob, she said, is a “man who will forever be known by his first name by this committee.”
That’s right. Bob.
Just plain-old Bob.
According to ample evidence, Bob is a longtime CIA contact of last week’s star witness, oil financier Roger Tamraz.
“The CIA has told this committee that it’s illegal for Bob’s full name to be revealed in public,” Collins said Thursday. “In fact, although I am a United States senator and have access to classified information, I don’t know Bob’s last name.”
It may reflect the jumbled ways of the GOP majority that Collins doesn’t know, because lots of people, including me, do know. But the hearing’s grandest fiction persists and prompted the most singular media handout of its six-week run.
It came late Thursday from high-profile Washington attorney Victoria Toensing, a frequent TV commentator on legal matters. It was titled, “STATEMENT OF BOB” and indicated that it came from “Victoria Toensing, Counsel for Bob, 202-289-7701.”
“At no time did Bob ever pressure for Mr. Tamraz to be admitted to the White House,” it states, contradicting other evidence and testimony.
(Imagine going to American Bar Association cocktail parties, shaking hands with a personal-injury specialist from, say, Phoenix, and announcing, “Hi, I’m Vicki Toensing of Washington, attorney for Bob!”)
The reason I know Bob’s full name is that it’s all over the committee’s May 13 deposition of Tamraz, whose well-publicized testimony was drolly unrepentant as he detailed the symbiotic relationship between him and the Democrats who craved his money.
Bob’s last name, however, is blacked out in the copy of that same deposition handed out by the committee when Tamraz testified Thursday. That’s because the official copy had been edited by the CIA.
Without doubting the need to keep secrets, one can find the edited version a mirror onto government overreaching. There’s lots of black.
For starters, Tamraz has been so chatty, including giving the Tribune a long phone interview from Paris, and he’s already disclosed much of what the CIA excised. That includes the wacky notion of getting $100 million to a politically ailing Boris Yeltsin, in return for Yeltsin cutting Tamraz slack on a pipeline deal.
Second, it may be an absurdity too gross to be insisted upon that many other matters are of any sensitivity, except to the CIA’s ego.
What follows are some passages excised by the CIA, according to the original obtained earlier by the Tribune. Lest I be accused of sedition, I’ll not disclose Bob’s last name, though closer scrutiny of the panel’s own files might have brought it to Collins’ attention.
Explaining his growing involvement in the political process, Tamraz noted hefty contributions to President Ronald Reagan that gave him “Republican Eagle” status. He declared:
. . . The CIA since 1973 until now, uninterrupted, has remained in touch with me, but I wanted to go beyond the CIA because the CIA is a passive operation and just picks up information and collects. That does not go into policy and I could feel from them a lot of the frustration that we can get a policy done. We go to Iran, we mess it up. We go to Iraq, we mess it up. . . .
Here’s Tamraz on his often-reported relationship with the agency:
A: Since the beginning, in ’73, I voluntarily helped the agency in information and analysis and sometimes helped them on certain specific tasks, and I was never an asset of the CIA. I was never paid anything by them.
Q: Was this on a voluntary basis?
A: Yes, voluntary basis, and I’m very proud of it. It’s sort of my contribution to this country. I know I took certain specific risks. I’m paying for them today, but, you know, it’s like one of our kids going to Vietnam. He’s doing his job. I did my job in my area.
Q: And as you sit here today, you still view yourself in that relationship as a volunteer?
A: Absolutely, and I hope I can continue that because I think I have a lot of insight to give this country in a specific range of problems, especially in the Middle East and Islamic fundamentalism and other problems we will be facing in the future, and that was part of my reason to try to get to the White House and the DNC, to promote myself as somebody as being an expert in that field.
Here Tamraz broaches the $100 million for Yeltsin:
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A: All right, I’d like to discuss the issue of the $100 million to Yeltsin because it sounded as if it was my intention to get involved with a situation that would be that way, but what could have been part of the discussion on raising funds for elections or other things would be at some stage we would do legitimate business with him and where my pipeline would be involved and maybe some Russian workers would be invited to do the job or that we would buy pipe, steel pipe from Russia. So that, the quid pro quo would be in a very legitimate way.
A personal favorite among the CIA-censored declarations comes when Tamraz discusses his hiring as a consultant a CIA alumnus, but then how they parted company after the alum somehow botched some matter with the president of Azerbaijan.
In the process we are able to infer that CIA grads probably can be found jammed into a Southwest Airlines flight.
“. . . And maybe he couldn’t deliver or maybe, you know, these guys, they live 30 years with the power of the U.S. government behind them and the day they leave, they have no parachute.
They have a re-entry problem into private life, I think, although I like CIA people. I have hired them before. I’ve been hiring them since ’73. I think they are our best people. They’re unsung heroes. Usually they’re not capricious. They have cool nerves. They have good analysis.
And compared to oil executives, they accept a much harder position, they don’t have to fly first class, and they don’t have an expense account. I mean, the oil executives want their own private planes and these guys are not. They’re very hardened and good.
The CIA also is apparently nervous about critical matters of world geography getting out. Here is Tamraz during a discussion of his pipeline proposal for the Caspian Sea.
Q: Could you explain that a little more?
A: Well, you know, in Washington during that period there was a very big debate on whether the pipeline from the Caspian should only go through Russian territory. I don’t know if you remember the geography. I can maybe do it for you.
Q: I know somewhat.
A: OK. You’ve got the Caspian sitting in the middle. This is the Caspian Sea. You’ve got Russia here. This is Kazakhstan. This is Turkistan. This is Iran here. This is Azerbaijan and then Georgia and Armenia.
So you don’t have too many places. It’s landlocked. So you either go through Russia, which is what the Russians wanted. So all these newly Islamic states took their independence but if Russia can keep the pipeline, these guys can’t go anywhere, and that was the Russian policy.
In Washington we had the big debate (Deputy Secretary of State) Strobe Talbott would say, “This is the back yard of the Russians; don’t excite them. If they want to keep a stranglehold on these guys, let them do it. We will worry about Latvia and NATO and other things.”
Pretty racy, eh? If you want more tidbits, I have one suggestion.
Call Bob.