So you're President of some banana republic. Your brother runs the military, your college roommate is Minister of Mining, and the cash keeps flowing into the palace and out to your Swiss account. Tragically, pesky human rights activists are hurting your image in the free world. How best to polish your reputation for the decisionmakers of American aid and military assistance?
The answer begins on K Street. Despots across the globe are paying millions to Washington lobbyists to butter up American politicians and gloss over nasty records of brutality and corruption. While the Abramoff and Jefferson scandals brought lobbying abuses to the front pages of the papers, perfectly legal arrangements keep dictators in the good graces of Congress, the White House, and the State Department.
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The process is simple: A foreign government hires a firm, usually populated by former Hill staffers, to represent its interests in Washington. The firm holds meetings with Congressmen, federal agencies, and journalists where the lobbyists soft-pedal the various atrocities of their client and paint him in the softest eggshell light.
Foreign principle lobbying has a long and sordid history. In the late 1930s, the Nazis did public relations work through a front firm called the German Dye Trust. Exposure of the Americans working for the Nazis led to the 1938 passage of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which required lobbyists engaging in political activities for foreign governments to file with the Department of Justice. FARA currently requires firms to file updates twice a year listing the firm’s registered agents, payments from foreign governments, any political activities including dissemination of informational material on behalf of the client, and any political contributions by individual agents.
Despite such sunshine efforts, lobbyists have comfortably shilled for compassionate gentlemen like the late Romanian despot Nicolai Ceausescu, Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, and the totalitarian ruling junta in Burma. Prominent DC firms in the business have included Patton Boggs (representing Saudi Arabia and Angola among other clients,) and Hill & Knowlton (handling Saudi oil interests.)
Congress is an eternal wellspring of lobbyists, including former Speaker of the House Bob Livingston (whose Livingston Group helped Turkey fight against Congressional resolutions on the Armenian genocide) and former Senator Robert Torricelli (who chose not to run for re-election following implication in a bribery scandal, and parlayed this valuable Hill experience into a lobbying gig for Taiwan.)
The Munchkin King of this sordid business was one Edward von Kloberg III, (close but not quite his given name,) who flamboyantly adorned himself with sashes and medals while representing Samuel Doe, Saddam Hussein, and Mobutu Sese-Seko before dramatically leaping from the parapet of a Roman castle in 2005. In an embarrassing sting operation by Spy magazine, von Kloberg once expressed interest in a client offering $1 million to lobby for causes including German annexation of Poland and a halt on immigration to the "fatherland."
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It is difficult to prove a watertight connection between foreign dollars and specific policy outcomes. However, firms commonly point to their successes while competing for clients. Effective lobbying can result in sympathetic editorials in prominent newspapers (usually following all-expenses-paid journalistic junkets to Potemkin villages), as well as high-profile informational panels featuring compensated think-tankers. (The firm gives the event an innocuous title, pays the talking heads, and feeds the policymaking guests on the dictator’s dime.)
The sheer number of countries involved suggests that it must be worth the money. According to the Department of Justice, there have been over 1,700 lobbyists in recent years representing more than 100 countries. However, the real number is likely even higher. A 1990 report by the Government Accountability Office estimated that less than half of foreign lobbyists actually register with the FARA unit. FARA has never been used as an enforcement mechanism, and no one has yet been prosecuted for failure to register.
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Tiny Equatorial Guinea knows how to buy friends and influence people. Sitting on massive oil reserves, the smallest state in West Africa boasts a staggering gross domestic product per capita of $50,000 -- on paper. In reality, two-thirds of Equatoguineans live on $1 a day, and the country ranks an unimpressive 120th out of 177 on the United Nations’ 2006 Human Development Index. State Department reports cite "numerous serious human rights abuses," and further note that there are "no effective domestic human rights nongovernmental organizations." On top of this petrol pyramid sits Kleptocrat-in-Chief Teodoro Obiang, rapidly approaching his 30th anniversary running the country, and estimated by Forbes at a personal wealth of $600 million.
This little dictatorship has big friends on K Street. In 2005 and 2006, the government of Equatorial Guinea paid $4 million to powerful lobby shop Cassidy and Associates. According to the contract, Cassidy’s job is to "assist Equatorial Guinea (EG) in advancing its relationship with the United States by enhancing the U.S.’ understanding of EG’s history, culture, and strategic goals." Further, Cassidy "[advises] U.S. policymakers of progress that the government of EG has made on various key issues," as well as "keeping EG apprised of U.S. programs that could help the government." Cassidy also helped develop and maintain the government’s official website.
Through "regular conversations" with officials in the U.S. government, Cassidy pitches Equatoguinean interests in areas including banking, the IMET program (International Military Education and Training) and defense issues, environmental protection, and human rights and democratic reforms.
IMET in particular offers the both practical benefits and a sheen of U.S.-backed legitimacy. The President’s foreign operations budget request for 2008 offered $45,000 for IMET, but the Senate version of the bill may yet cut this money on human rights grounds.
Bush has a particularly cordial relationship with the Obiang gang. In 2004, the President issued a declaration barring corrupt foreign officials and their family beneficiaries from visiting the United States. The first family of Equatorial Guinea should have been poster children for this policy. However, President Obiang was granted not only entry into the United States but a White House visit in April of 2006.
Cassidy's "banking assistance" is also filthy business. Obiang treats the Equatoguinean treasury as a slush fund. His son, on a paper salary of $5,000 a month, is proud owner of a $35 million mansion in Malibu. A Senate investigation into Riggs Bank "could not determine the purpose" of several embassy accounts, and the bank was eventually hit with a $25 million fine over its handling of Equatoguinean funds.
Cassidy’s lobbyists have met with U.S. Senators George Allen and Ted Stevens as well as staffers for over a dozen other Congressmen. They have also met senior advisers at the Department of State, as well as staffers from the Treasury and Commerce Departments, the National Security Council, House Foreign Relations Committee, Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations(!), and United States Agency for International Development.
The point men on the EG file are Juan Carlos Benitez and Amos Hochstein. Benitez is a Bush "Pioneer" who scored a lobbying contract for the Guam Economic Development Agency two weeks after his wife was given a U.S. federal appointment as Special Economic Advisor to the island. Hochstein arrived at Cassidy following stints with the office of Rep. Sam Gejdenson and later the House Committee on Foreign Relations.
In a Washington Post interview, Hochstein cited his experience working with Gejdenson, the son of Holocaust survivors, in forming his commitment to "fighting tyrants like Lukashenko in Belarus." (Hochstein should read Freedom House’s 2006 Freedom in the World report, which gives his client the same peachy scores as the noted Byelorussian thug.) Hochstein further noted President Obiang’s "deep care for his people," and contested the poverty statistics presented by the interviewer. Recently, Hochstein completed his trip through the revolving door by leaving Cassidy to serve as Policy Director for the Presidential run of Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd.
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Only a minority of foreign agents serve regimes as nasty as Obiang’s. A search of the FARA database mainly reveals clients like the Switzerland Tourism Board. What is troubling, however, is the industry’s absolute lack of any oversight and policing mechanisms whatsoever. As noted, no one has been prosecuted for failure to register, and the process itself is perfectly legal no matter how grotesque the client regime.
A number of proposals have been floated to improve transparency, including a call by Rep. Marcy Kaptur to increase the revolving door moratorium for foreign agents to five years after leaving office. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen also introduced a bill to block former Congressmen from lobbying for states designated as sponsors of terrorism, but this would have very little effect as most lobbyists are former Hill staff or come from the private sector. Further, removing "terrorist" states would still exclude most of the world's nastiest regimes worldwide.
Unfortunately, the only oversight mechanism still appears to be "naming and shaming." Ken Silverstein caused a stir with a remarkable undercover investigation posing as a businessman hiring lobbyists to polish the image of the brutal regime in Turkmenistan. ("Their men in Washington," Harper’s, July 2007.) Prominent DC lobby shops promised well-attended roundtables hosted by think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations in the interest of improving the country’s reputation. The firms also offered to arrange meetings between Turkmen officials and key members of Congress—perhaps even a "fact-finding" mission to the country funded by a university or business group.
Silverstein not only demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of some lobbying firms, but also touched a sensitive nerve with the Beltway social club. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, in a panicked defense of the industry, turned around and condemned Silverstein for misleading the lobby shops in order to carry out his undercover investigation. Silverstein shot back: "If you want to weigh my [journalistic] ethics...against the ethics of agreeing to represent and whitewash the record of a Stalinist dictatorship, I'm pretty comfortable with that comparison."
Sadly, as Kurtz inadvertently reminds us, naming and shaming only works on people with a functioning shame reflex. Prominent neo-conservative pundit Michael Ledeen is a registered agent for Trout Cacheris LLC, doing public relations for the office of Republic of Congo President Denis Sassou-Nguesso. In 2006, Freedom House dropped the Republic of Congo from "partly free" to "not free." A June 2007 report by Global Witness suggests that Sassou-Nguesso’s son is paying his Louis Vuitton credit card bills with state funds, as well as siphoning money off of state oil sales. Anti-corruption campaigners have been arrested for the crime of defaming the President.
In addition to lobbying for a kleptocratic thug, Micheal Ledeen is currently (straight faces, people) "Freedom Scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Until recently, FARA records were virtually worthless to the public. Justice Department officials claimed in 2004 that the FARA database could not be copied electronically because their computer system was "too fragile" and the process could cause "major loss of data." Photocopies at the New York Avenue FARA office cost 50 cents each —- for documents that are often hundreds of pages long. The Government Accounting Office has repeatedly said that the FARA unit lacks adequate resources to fulfill its mandate. In Spring 2007, FARA documents were finally placed into a searchable web database, although most of the older documents are still only available in paper form.
Perhaps, increased exposure for firms will improve self-regulation. The recent posting of FARA records online should allow watchdog groups to keep a closer eye on the clientele of Washington lobbyists. Notwithstanding the fainting-couch response of the Post op-eds page, undercover reports can further embarrass the worst offenders. (It’s about time for a reprise of the Spy feature on Kloberg..)
The failure of Congress to pass significant legislation on the matter of foreign agents is a testament to the revolving door in Washington. Legislators are loathe to restrict their own post-Congressional careers. The elite media’s unwillingness to raise awareness of the situation similarly belies their own comfortable relationship with the status quo. Without new oversight mechanisms, K Street's lipsticked-pig parade will continue unabated.