Fredo Arias-King, whose work on Russia we hold in high regard, recently had an interesting comment piece (part of the NRO Symposium we linked to yesterday) pointing out the potentially problematic revival of Strobe Talbott's diplomatic career as part of President-elect Barack Obama's foreign policy team:However, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will likely bring Strobe Talbott -- her husband's "Russia Hand" in the 1990s -- back to life. This is worrying. At a time when Russia looked to Washington for guidance after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Talbott helped (morally and materially) not the America-friendly democrats but the remnants of Soviet power. When Talbott was a journalist, he had career-boosting relations with a KGB agent called Viktor Louis, and this could have trapped him in a Faustian bargain that affected his judgment later. Clinton herself is close to America's allies in that region, but could sub-contract Russia to Talbott.
For his part, Putin owes a lot to Talbott, but is known to be ungrateful to past supporters.
Most recently Strobe got torched by the latest spy memoir of Sergei Tretyakov by Pete Earley, Comrade J: The Untold Secretes of Russia's Master Spy in America after the End of the Cold War. Tretyakov, who was the Kremlin's highest ranking SVR director in the United States, featured Talbott as one of the main characters in his lurid tales of spy gossip. Below is an excerpt of an interview with Earley about Talbott:
Taking this into account, it is most likely much too early for anybody to be debating Obama's Strobe Talbott problem on Russia. We can't be sure that that Hillary Clinton will appoint him, and one would also certainly hope that Russia is a foreign policy issue that is "subcontracted" to someone at Talbott's level ... certainly the war in Georgia has once again made the Russia file one of the top three foreign policy issues for the next administration. Furthermore, as if in anticipation of the shifting political winds, Talbott's writings lately have more or less been resonating in the mainstream beltway narrative on the unacceptable conduct of Russia in the August war and in other areas. (On Aug. 15, he roundly condemned the Russian position on the sovereignty of Georgia's borders - and this is after all the architect of NATO's expansion into the Baltics, the issue which all of a sudden really bothers the Kremlin).Q: That's nothing close to being a spy, right?
A: Sergei goes to great lengths to say he had absolutely no information that Strobe Talbott was a spy, and he wants to make that very clear. In fact, he believes Talbott saw himself as an ardent American patriot. But what Talbott did, according to what Sergei was told, was that he put himself in a position where the SVR thought they could manipulate and use him.
First of all, the SVR literally did a background personality investigation of Talbott. It decided that he was vulnerable through his ego. Like many Westerners, who were eager to see themselves as expert on the Soviet Union and later on Russia, that they would come rushing in and have ideas on how to save these poor, simple-minded Russians; and that they naively did not realize they were dealing with a tiger, a sleeping tiger, but a tiger.
Sergei said that the SVR drafted specific questions and fed them to Talbott's counterpart in the Russian government, Georgi Mamedov -- the man he was meeting with -- and encouraged Mamedov to meet privately with Talbott, to develop a friendship with him. Talbott brags later in his own books about how he and this diplomat (Mamedov) became very close friends. What Sergei says is that the SVR was feeding questions to this contact to present to Talbott and that he (Talbott) was unwittingly providing them with information the SVR found extremely valuable.
Q: Did Talbott do any damage to the United States?
A: In addition to Tretyakov's statements, I think you have to look at what's known as the "Cox Report," which is named after Rep. Christopher Cox. It looked at top-secret documents and how the Clinton administration handled Russia. It came out very strongly saying that the Clinton administration -- and that includes Talbott -- really had what they called "unchecked" backing of Yeltsin that undermined the development of democratic institutions by short-circuiting the legislative process in Russia and making sure that Yeltsin and his cronies stayed in power.
Q: Talbott and Mamedov both told you what Tretyakov was saying was not true.
A: Talbott says on Page 184 it was erroneous and misleading. And Mamedov said it was blatant lies and nothing else.
Q: Who do you believe?
A: I believe Tretyakov. Absolutely. I wouldn't have printed it if I didn't believe him. OK, why would I believe him? You have his statement: You'd have to wonder what would his motive be for saying Talbott was a "special unofficial contact" if he weren't. I don't see any obvious motive there. There are plenty of other scandalous stories in the book. Throwing Talbott in doesn't make a difference in the book selling or not selling.
You have to look at the Cox Report. There is another verification that is independent of Tretyakov. A bug was found in the State Department. It was planted during the Yeltsin administration and the FBI found out about the bug. I was told by an FBI source -- and there's a newspaper account of it at the time -- that the FBI went to Madeleine Albright, secretary of state, and asked her to please don't talk about our investigation to your deputy, Strobe Talbott.
Why did they do that? Because the FBI was worried that Talbott was too close to his Russian contacts and that he might inadvertently say something that would hurt their investigation. When you have an FBI source telling me, but also telling a reporter at the time -- and who reported it on the Internet -- that they were concerned about how close (Talbott) was to the Russians, then I think that lends credibility to what Tretyakov's statements are.
However this is also the approach that exactly has worried so many of Talbott's critics - that he is capable of voicing the same concerns and criticisms of what is going wrong in Russia, yet end up recommending policies that seem oddly consistent with Moscow's preferences.
