RIA NOVOSTI, Russia
Nov. 1, 2004
UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY TO DEBATE KARABAKH? NO WAY TO CURE THE MATTER,
WARNS RUSSIA’S FOREIGN MINISTRY
MOSCOW, November 1 (RIA Novosti) – The United Nations General Assembly
supposes to take up the Karabakh issue. The prospect will certainly not
encourage negotiations on the problem-laden Azeri territory populated
by Armenians for centuries. The opinion comes from Russia’s Ministry of
Foreign Affairs press and information department. It spoke up after an
initiative came to add “Developments in the Occupied Areas of
Azerbaijan” to the General Assembly agenda.
“The co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk group, Russia among them, abstained as
the issue was put to vote. As we see it, the initiative for debates
parallel to an OSCE discussion will hardly be beneficial for the
negotiations.” The vote shows the world’s majority to share Russian
diplomats’ point, say ministerial PR.
“As for the Karabakh settlement negotiations, Russia is known to be
interested in the problem solved as soon as possible. Russia is
promoting settlement in every possible way, be it through bilateral
efforts or as Minsk group co-chair on the Organisation for Security and
Cooperation in Europe,” stresses the Foreign Ministry. The Minsk group
format helps to settle whatever aspects of the Karabakh conflict, and
to ensure the peace cause making progress, is Moscow’s opinion.
A recent Armenian-Azeri presidential summit highlighted a chance to
resume negotiations for a mutually acceptable solution, points out the
Foreign Ministry.

The Gazette (Montreal)
October 30, 2004 Saturday
Final Edition
Taking a clue from Agatha Christie: Writer inspires andrew Eames to
take a trip on Orient Express
by PAUL CARBRAY, The Gazette
The 8:55 to Baghdad
Andrew Eames, Bantam Press, 401 pages, $37.95
In 1928, Agatha Christie, recovering from a failed marriage and already
a well-known mystery writer, decided to take a holiday.
Not for her the usual English vacation in Blackpool, Torquay or the
south of France. Instead, Christie travelled on the Orient Express to
Istanbul, then on to Baghdad, where she set out on a tour of Iraq.
Certainly not the vacation spot that the usual traveller in 2004 would
choose. Even in comparatively benign 1928, when Iraq was under a
British mandate, it was hardly a hot destination.
Nonetheless, Christie, a 30something single mother, travelled there,
and her journey had a happy ending. It was in Iraq that Christie met
archeologist Max Mallowan on a dig at the ancient site of Ur. The two
married and lived, from all accounts, happily ever after.
Andrew Eames, an English journalist, was unaware of Christie’s journey
until he travelled to Aleppo, Syria, where he wanted to visit the souk,
the city’s ancient covered market.
“I’d heard that the longest roofed market in the world was still a
scene out of Aladdin or Indiana Jones, and I wanted to see it for
myself,” he says.
In Aleppo, Eames stayed at a well-known hotel run by an Armenian, Armen
Masloumian. While chatting, Masloumian tells Eames about the famous
people who have stayed in the hotel, including Lawrence of Arabia,
Theodore Roosevelt, Kemal Ataturk (the founder of modern Turkey) and,
of course, Agatha Christie.
Later, at dinner with the owner and his mother, Sally, “a cool
septuagenarian with an unwavering gaze,” Eames returns to the subject
of the hotel’s famous guests, and Christie is mentioned.
Probably researching her mystery novel Murder on the Orient Express,
Eames suggests.
“Mrs. Masloumian quickly set me right. ‘No,’ she said, ‘she used to
come here to do her shopping. And to get her hair done. From Nineveh.
With Max.’ ”
Nineveh? Max? Eames, unaware of Christie’s story, is intrigued and
begins to investigate. Soon, he is hooked by the idea of the author of
the quintessentially English drawing-room mystery travelling to the
exotic Middle East, and decides to trace the path of Christie’s
journey.
It’s late 2002 when Eames sets out on his trip, and war clouds are
gathering over Iraq. Nonetheless, he boards a train from the London
suburb of Sunningdale, “not because I knew for sure that Agatha had
travelled on it back in 1928, but because it got me to Victoria (train
station in London) in plenty of time for a train I knew for sure she
had.”
That train is the reconstituted – and considerably less glamorous –
Orient Express.
Eames soon learns that in 2002, “there are few journeys which are far
more complex and difficult than they were 75 years ago, but to travel
from London to Baghdad, by train, is one of them.”
But part of the romance of travel is not in arriving, but in getting
there, and that’s true of Eames’s book.
For much of the journey, through Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and
on to Turkey, Eames meets some fascinating locals and delves lightly
into their history.
Wisely, Eames doesn’t overdo the Christie quest while on his travels,
but concentrates on the cities and countries along the way and the
people he meets.
It is only on arrival in Aleppo, where he revisits the steely-eyed Mrs.
Masloumian, that he picks up the Christie story again.
Then it’s on to Iraq, where he arrives at the border at the same time
as the United Nations weapons inspectors. He travels with a disparate
group on a bus tour, who provide comic fodder and speculations about
what would prompt seemingly ordinary people, many of them pensioners,
to travel to a country on the brink of war.
Surprisingly, Eames is welcomed by Iraqis and brings his Christie tale
to a close by visiting the archeological sites she and Mallowan visited
for several decades.

The Gazette (Montreal)
October 30, 2004 Saturday
Final Edition
Playing musical name games
by ARTHUR KAPTAINIS, The Gazette
The sensational recital appearance last Sunday of the 19-year-old
Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan raises an interesting question:
How should we spell his name?
Usually the individual whose name it is has total authority over the
matter. But when names are transliterated – from Cyrillic or, as in
this case, Armenian script – the destination audience is entitled to a
say in the matter.
First, know that his surname is identical to that of the composer Aram
Khachaturian. As fate would have it, young Khachatryan has recorded
Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto. The spellings are not harmonized. Nor
is it hard to imagine Sergey playing Sergei – Prokofiev.
Make that Prokofiev as opposed to Prokofieff, the spelling seen during
the composer’s lifetime. Rachmaninoff is also starting to slip in
favour of Rachmaninov – in spite of the fact that the California-based
composer habitually signed his name with two f’s.
Transliterations come and go – French and English do not agree on a
host of musicians, including Stravinsky (Stravinski), Tchaikovsky
(Tchaikovski) and Shostakovich (Chostakovich).
Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, in English, are themselves obsolete
spellings by current academic standards. I recall a music library in
which the card catalogue cross-referenced Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich
– universal in English – to “correct” spellings that in fact are never
used.
I have not mentioned German, a language with spellings of its own,
including eyesores like Schostakowitsch and Prokofijew. Since Sergey
Khachatryan lives in Frankfurt – he appears to be an interesting
example of an Armenian violinist not schooled in the Russian style – he
cannot afford to disregard the priorities of his second home. At any
rate, he is young enough to change his name and mind. Sergei
Khachaturian looks good to me. Possibly Prokofiev and Aram would
approve.
– – –
Pro Musica subscribers have been pleasantly surprised this season by a
renovation – if that is the word – of the stage of the Theatre
Maisonneuve. Hiring its own team of three technicians in the post-IATSE
era, the chamber society covers the pit of the second-largest
performance space in Place des Arts before each performance, thus
extending the stage apron and bringing artists closer to the audience.
The rear is defined by a curtain, dramatically illuminated by coloured
lights shining from the floor of the stage. It is a great improvement
over the drab beige shell we have known for years. Black panels in
front of this curtain give the musicians visual definition. More
importantly, they project sound more crisply to the crowd. The new
stage takes less than an hour to assemble, according to Pro Musica
managing director Monique Dube.
Necessity was the mother of all this invention last season when Pro
Musica found itself squeezed by the sets of Odyssee, a long-running
musical. All the same, with a few bold and simple strokes, the
long-suffering PdA resident has transformed a midsize chasm with
mediocre acoustics into a pleasant chamber hall.
Can something then be done with larger Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, home,
for better or worse, of the MSO? If the experts answer no, this is
probably because they have never bothered to try.
– – –
Ross Pratt, a former director of chamber music at the CAMMAC music camp
and pianist known for post-Romantic and French repertoire, has died in
Montreal at the age of 88.
Born in Winnipeg, Pratt had a wide-ranging education and career. He
trained in London before the Second World War and toured Asia and
Australia during the conflict to perform for servicemen. Gazette
clippings reveal that he toured Western Canada in the winter of 1944
and Mexico and central America in the summer of 1945.
Pratt was an educator as well as a performer. He taught in London
intermittently in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as at the University of
Alberta and Carleton University. His home base, however, was Montreal,
where he was a teacher at the Conservatoire. Among his notable
performances was the Canadian premiere of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a
Theme of Paganini, which he gave in 1940 with the Montreal Orchestra
under Douglas Clarke. He was also the soloist in Ravel’s Piano Concerto
in G in the Montreal debut (with the MSO) of conductor Leonard
Bernstein in 1944.
Canadian composers often figured in Pratt’s solo programs. He also
enjoyed the lecture-recital format. The last Gazette review of Pratt,
on March 1, 1985, was of a Debussy program at Marianopolis College with
spoken comments in English and French.
After this the record then falls silent. A friend of Pratt says he died
on Oct. 6 of pneumonia, after a long illness.
There will be a memorial concert tomorrow at the Unitarian Church, 5035
de Maisonneuve Blvd. W., at 3:30 p.m. Pratt is survived by his wife
Audrey, who suggests a memorial donation to CAMMAC, 8 Chemin Cammac,
Harrington, Que. J8G 2T2 .
– – –
Yannick Nezet-Seguin has earned a 21-gun rave for his last-minute
leadership last week of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra through
Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.
“I doubt the excellent, absent (Emmanuel) Krivine, even on a good day,
could have kissed the sleeping beauty of this symphony awake as surely
as this young prince of the conductor’s art did on Thursday,” wrote
Globe and Mail contributor Ken Winters.
Praising the interpretation in some detail, the veteran critic asked
why Nezet-Seguin was not considered for the directorships of the MSO or
TSO.
“Genuine talent is rare,” he concluded, “but when it comes, it can
change your perspective and your mind. Nezet-Seguin is that genuine
article.”

RIA Novosti
October 30, 2004
ARMENIA, WORLD BANK COOPERATING RATHER EFFECTIVELY
YEREVAN, October 30 (RIA Novosti’s Gamlet Matevosyan) – Cooperation
between Armenia and the World Bank is developing rather effectively,
President Robert Kocharyan of Armenia said at a conference involving
Ms. Donna M. Dawsett-Coirolo, World Bank regional director for South
Caucasus, Mr. Hussein Razawi, World Bank director for the
infrastructure and energy sector, and Mr. Roger Robinson, director of
the World Bank’s Yerevan office.
Mr. Kocharyan pointed out the World Bank’s important role in
facilitating the implementation of Armenian reforms, presidential
press-service officials noted.
Robert Kocharyan voiced hope to the effect that this influential
international financial organization will continue to render all-out
assistance to Armenia in the future, as well.
Those taking part in the conference noted the importance of
streamlining Armenia’s tax and customs regulation legislation.
Fuel and energy cooperation prospects were discussed, as well.
The World Bank has implemented 36 programs worth nearly $821 million on
Armenian territory.
Armenia receives 40-year World Bank loans in accordance with IDA
(International Development Association) terms; such loans, which are
allocated to the world’s poorest countries, stipulate 0.75% annual
interest, as well as an easy-term ten-year period.
In June 2004 the World Bank’s board of executive directors endorsed a
new Armenian-aid strategy for the 2005-2008 period. This strategy calls
for setting aside loans to the tune of $220 million.
The new strategy lists the following priorities:
– helping the Armenian Government in its efforts to improve the
business climate and to create more jobs;
-facilitating better and more effective management;
– streamlining the public-health system, the education system, as well
as the basic infrastructure.
The previous Armenian-aid strategy for the 2002-2004 period had
stipulated loans worth about $190 million. Among other things, the
World Bank had financed construction of 120 km of local roads within
the framework of that strategy. The civil service reform was launched
in line with the new law based on an institutional administration
survey. More than 130 community projects were implemented, thus
improving the life of 340,000 rural dwellers. 80 rural hospitals were
constructed and 118 physicians retrained as family doctors. Over 200 km
of irrigation canals were reconstructed, thereby enhancing the
productivity of nearly 80,000 hectares of farmlands. 112 new textbooks
were published and handed out to students all over Armenia; add to this
50 teaching aids.

ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
November 1, 2004 Monday
Russia transport min in Tbilisi for talks on traffic via Abkhazia
By Eka Mekhuzla, Tengiz Pachkoria
TBILISI
Russian Transport Minister Igor Levitin who is co-chairman of the
Russian part of the Russian-Georgian intergovernmental commission for
economic cooperation issues arrived in Tbilisi on a one-day visit on
Monday.
Levitin intends to discuss with the head of the Georgian part of the
commission Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania matters pertaining to the
preparation of the next session of the commission to be held in the
first half of 2005.
Levitin told reporters in Tbilisi, “As the Russian transport minister I
shall consider in Tbilisi issues of transport services in the
trans-Caucasian states and the organisation of ferry crossing between
the ports of Poti (Georgia) and Kavkaz (Russia).”
“I also intend to study Tbilisi’s approaches towards the opening of
through railway connection along the entire length of the former
Transcaucasian railway,” he said.
Georgian Economics Minister Kakha Bendukidze said for his part the
sides “will discuss issues of railway traffic resumption between
Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan and restoration of traffic between the
Transcaucasian countries and Russia.”
Sources in the Russian embassy in Georgia told Itar-Tass Levitin would
also hold talks with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.
In October, the Russian transport minister paid a visit to Armenia
where he also discussed the resumption of the Russian-Armenian through
railway connection via the Abkhazian section of the Georgian railway.
Traffic through this stretch was interrupted after an armed conflict in
Abkhazia began in August 1992.
The Georgian side has not once stated in recent years it is ready to
discuss the issue of opening of through traffic along this section
“synchronously with the process of organised return of refugees to
Abkhazia.”
The Russian Transport Ministry’s spokesperson Svetlana Kryshtanovskaya
cited Levitin as saying at his meeting with Georgian Prime Minister
Zurab Zhvania on Monday that bilateral trade reached 237 million
dollars in 2003, up 48 percent as against the 2002 figure.
Russia is Georgia’s biggest trade partner. Trade with Russia accounts
for 15 percent of Georgia’s foreign trade.
Russia’s exports to Georgia comprise electric power, products of
chemical industry and metallurgy, equipment and trucks.
Russia’s imports from Georgia are wine, mineral water, ferroalloys and
other goods.
The trade turnover between Georgia and Russia reached 203.5 million
dollars in January to August 2004, which is 34 percent above the figure
of the same period in 2003.

ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
November 1, 2004 Monday
Nagorno-Karabakh settlement must be in OSCE framework
By Vitaly Kuchkin
MOSCOW
The suggestion to debate the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement at the session
of the United Nations General Assembly parallel with the discussion in
the OSCE framework “can hardly have a beneficial effect on the
negotiating process”, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated on Monday.
The ministry commented on Russia’s stand regarding the suggestion to
put on the agenda of the session the clause on “the situation in the
occupied territories of Azerbaijan”.
“Russia, just as other co-chairmen of the MInsk group of the OSCE,
abstained from the voting”, the ministry pointed out. “The results of
the voting showed that most members of the world community share this
stand”. “Russia is interested in the early settlement of the
Nagorno-Karabakh problem and promotes this in every way, be it in the
bilateral respect or as the co-chairman of the Minsk group of the
OSCE”, the ministry noted. “The group’s format permits it to deal with
any problems related to the conflict and to ensuring peace”, the
ministry believes. “Besides, the recent meeting of the presidents of
Azerbaijan and Armenia opened prospects for the resumption of the talks
on the quest of the mutually-acceptable solution”.

Agency WPS
DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
November 1, 2004, Monday
TBILISI HAS CLOSED THE BORDER FOR RUSSIAN DRAFTEES[]
SOURCE: Nezavisimaya Gazeta, October 29, 2004, p. 5
by Yury Simonyan
Around 400 Russian servicemen currently wait for Georgian visas in the
Armenian city of Gyumri. They must be sent to the 62nd military base in
Akhalkalaki. The command of the Russian group of forces in the
Trans-Caucasian region has repeatedly asked the Georgian Foreign
Ministry to speed up the process of issuing visas to the Russian
servicemen. Colonel Vladimir Kuparadze, deputy commander of the Russian
group of forces in the Trans-Caucasian region, said that the delay is
caused by formalism of the Georgian Foreign Ministry, which
scrupulously verified the list and the actual number of draftees.
Colonel Kuparadze said: “The Georgian Foreign Ministry’s hesitation is
caused by the fact that we intend to completely deploy the military
base. We previously lacked servicemen at the base, and intend to send
more soldiers to Georgia. At the same time, we do not violate the
agreements with the Georgian leadership. We have submitted all
documents required for issuing visas to the Georgian leadership. This
is a scheduled rotation of Russian servicemen. Our soldiers wait for a
permit to enter Georgia in Gyumri.”
The Georgian Foreign Ministry party confirmed the information announced
by the Russian group of forces. The Foreign Ministry stated: “We are
verifying the compliance of the documents submitted by the Russian
military with the agreements signed by the Georgian leadership.” At the
same time, the source in the Georgian ministry did not say when the
problem will be resolved. He noted that this procedure takes much time:
“This is routine, which takes time. However, we have already issued
some visas to Russian servicemen.”
In the meantime, the Georgian Defense Ministry intends to replace its
peacekeeping contingent in the zone of the Georgian-Ossetian conflict.
Georgia reported its intention to Major-General Marat Kulakhmetov,
commander of the peacekeeping force. It should be noted that the staff
of the peacekeeping force does not object against Georgia’s intention.
The Russian general said: “We do not protest despite the fact that
rotation must take place once every six months. The rotation of the
Russian and Ossetian battalions will take place according to the
schedule.”
However, Tskhinvali’s opinion regarding the impending (fifth) rotation
of the Georgian peacekeeping contingent is somewhat different. Boris
Chochiyev, co-chairman of the joint monitoring commission (South
Ossetia), stated: “We are sure that such frequent rotations of
peacekeeping contingents are part of a reconnaissance operation on the
eve of aggression against South Ossetia. Over 2,000 Georgian servicemen
have already examined this theater of war as a result of a range of
rotations.”
Translated by Alexander Dubovoi

AFX.COM
November 1, 2004 Monday 11:04 AM Eastern Time
Turkish conference on minority rights’ report ends in chaos
ANKARA
A debate over a report criticising breaches of minority rights in
aspiring European Union member Turkey collapsed when members of a
government-sponsored human rights group, which authored the document,
clashed in public.
The incident is the latest in a series of rows within the Human
Rights Advisory Board — a body attached to the office of Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan — which highlighted widespread hostility
in Turkey to advanced cultural freedoms for the country’s Kurdish and
non-Muslim communities.
Nationalist members of the board, which is comprised of government
officials, academics and civic groups, sabotaged a news conference
called to formally release the report, which makes some controversial
recommendations to the government and excerpts of which were last week
leaked to the media.
Shortly after the head of the board, Ibrahim Kaboglu, began
speaking a nationalist unionist grabbed the papers from his hands and
tore them to pieces, yelling: “This report is a fabrication and should
be torn apart.”
Kaboglu was forced to leave the hall, stating: “We cannot even hold
a news conference. This is the state of freedom of thought in Turkey.”
The EU, which Turkey is seeking to join, has long pressed Ankara to
grant equal cultural freedoms to its sizeable Kurdish minority as well
as smaller, non-Muslim communities such as Greeks, Armenians and Jews.

The New York Times
October 31, 2004 Sunday
Late Edition – Final
The Winds of War
By Amy Kroin
BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS
By Louis de Bernieres.
554 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.
Louis de Bernieres’s overstuffed new novel is an absorbing epic about
the waning years of the Ottoman Empire — but you may need to develop
your own mental filing system to keep up with all its characters and
incident.
Set in the fictional town of Eskibahce on the coast of southwest
Anatolia (now in Turkey), ”Birds Without Wings” has 95 chapters —
not to mention a six-part epilogue — that give us the perspectives of
dozens of characters. There is no central protagonist to guide the
proceedings; you might care more about one character than another, but
only a couple are on view for any length of time.
A good deal of research has clearly gone into ”Birds Without Wings,”
which opens in 1900 and ends in the early 1920’s. The narrative’s
scattered approach will be familiar to readers of de Bernieres, a
self-proclaimed ”Marquez parasite” whose ouevre includes a panoramic
trilogy set in a fictional Andean village. De Bernieres reached a wider
audience with ”Corelli’s Mandolin” (1994), which was made into a
mildly corny movie starring Nicolas Cage. That novel was far more fluid
and accessible than this latest; while political concerns drove much of
the story, the relationship between Corelli and the daughter of a local
doctor gave the book an emotional core.
”Birds Without Wings” opens with a group of loosely connected
anecdotes; only gradually do they begin to pick up weight. But the
central figure here is Eskibahce itself — a town, we learn early on,
that will eventually be destroyed. De Bernieres rhapsodically evokes
the pastel-hued houses, the songbirds that warble in cages outside each
dwelling, the sunlight reflecting off the mosque’s golden dome.
Christians and Muslims live side by side in relative harmony. The wife
of the revered imam is chummy with a Christian woman; a beautiful
Christian girl is betrothed from childhood to an adoring Muslim
goatherd; a Christian boy teaches his Muslim friend to read and write.
This mingling of religions and ethnicities reflected the larger
tolerance in the Ottoman Empire. Of course, there were fault lines
within the empire, and Eskibahce has its own fissures: a suspected
adulteress is stoned in the town square; the local drunk incites a mob
to assault an Armenian resident; an otherwise loving father forces his
son to murder his pregnant (and unwed) sister. These barbaric acts
disrupt the town’s natural rhythms, but never to the breaking point.
Only when war intervenes does everything fall apart. The Balkan wars
are followed by World War I, and then by the devastating conflict
between Turkey and Greece, which led to the expulsion of Turkish
Christians to Greece and the parallel evacuation of Greek Muslims to
Turkey. This is all documented in close detail.
De Bernieres has always been adept at juxtaposing brutality with
episodes of high comedy or romance, and that’s certainly the case here.
But about midway through the book the scales tip toward the tragic and
never tip back. World War I divides the young men of Eskibahce; Muslims
are recruited to fight while their Christian counterparts are relegated
to labor battalions. The novel’s most illuminating section is a series
of letters a young soldier named Karatavuk writes about the agonizing
campaign at Gallipoli. De Bernieres evokes the particular intimacy of
this legendary battle, and he humanizes war without minimizing its
horror. Australian soldiers fling not just bombs but gifts into enemy
trenches, and the Turkish soldiers reciprocate in kind. On another
occasion the enemies acknowledge one another by name while retrieving
the dead from the battlefield.
Plunked right in the middle of the proceedings is an extended chunk of
quasi-reportage concerning Mustafa Kemal (later Mustafa Kemal Ataturk),
the founder of the republic of Turkey. Kemal appears sporadically in
the book’s earlier pages, and there the juxtaposition of his story with
that of his fictional counterparts creates a striking narrative
tension. When he’s given center stage, however, the novel’s momentum
flags — these sections have the feel of a laborious history lesson.
”Birds Without Wings” will not appeal to admirers of spare,
economical prose. De Bernieres favors ornate description. Sometimes the
excess verbiage weighs the novel down; just as often, it gives it the
pleasingly busy feel of a 19th-century classic (it’s no surprise that
de Bernieres has cited ”War and Peace” as a model for his work). And
though he’s given to making grand pronouncements about war and
nationalism, he always makes sure that the political is personal. In
the end, this is a book about mourning, about grief at the loss of a
community where Muslims and Christians were more than neighbors, where
the imam went out of his way to bless a Christian child and Christians
prayed to the Virgin Mary for their Muslim brothers.

Village Voice (New York, NY)
November 2, 2004, Tuesday
BUSH’S COURTING OF SADDAM
by Wayne Barrett, With special reporting by Nathan Deuel
Sarkis Soghanalian, the international arms dealer who bought billions
in weapons for Saddam Hussein, says he was approached at a Newark
airport luncheon meeting in the early ’80s by a representative of then
Texas oil entrepreneur George W. Bush, who was seeking to do business
in Iraq. …..Featured in lengthy interviews on 60 Minutes, 20/20, and
PBS’s Frontline over the years, the twice-convicted Soghanalian was
dubbed the “Merchant of Death.” He was released from prison at the
request of federal prosecutors who, as recently as 2001, cited his
“substantial assistance to law enforcement.” Justice Department
officials questioned him in Washington this year about an ongoing case
in Peru involving the sale of 10,000 assault rifles to Colombian
guerrillas, but they did not extradite him though he is facing a
possible 15-year jail sentence there for brokering the deal.
Soghanalian recalled in half a dozen phone interviews with the Voice
that he met with a business associate of W’s whose full name he cannot
recall but who, like Soghanalian, was Armenian. The meeting was
arranged, he says, by a friend who was a leader in Armenian charity
circles. Soghanalian recalls that the business associate told him:
“George W. Bush wants to do business in Iraq.”
“Unfortunately, I was pretty high-profile at the time,” says
Soghanalian, “and everyone was trying to get close to me. Why would I
want their business? I knew his father. What did I need him for?”
Soghanalian, who had a stopover in Newark on his way to Baghdad, says
he can’t remember any specifics about the suggested business. The
businessman, he said, “was sent on behalf of Bush” and “said to me,
‘This is an important man.’ ” Soghanalian claims that the man told him
that W had “a lot of contacts overseas” and that Soghanalian replied:
“I have contacts too. I don’t need more contacts.” Soghanalian says he
has known the senior Bush since at least 1976, when Bush was CIA
director. Soghanalian has had such a long-standing CIA relationship
that David Armstrong of the National Security News Service calls him
the agency’s “arms dealer of choice.”
Soghanalian says Bush’s representative continued to “chase me around”
after the airport meeting. Living in an overseas location he did not
want disclosed, the 300-pound, 75-year-old legendary dealer said: “I am
not where I am and have never been where I was.” Though he volunteered
the story of the Newark solicitation, he expressed concerns about
“angering” the Bushes and repeatedly cut off later interviews, citing
health concerns.
It’s widely known that prior to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the Reagan
and George H.W. Bush administrations maintained friendly ties with
Hussein, but there has never before been any indication that the
current president was seeking business deals with him. In the ’80s, the
younger Bush managed a series of struggling Texas-based oil companies,
one of which, Harken Energy, did secure a major oil deal in Bahrain
that caused a public furor, since it appeared to have been awarded to
earn favor with the Bush administration. Bush’s storefront start-up
Arbusto (later renamed Bush Exploration) was in deep trouble in the
’83–’84 period when Soghanalian says the approach occurred.
The Soghanalian overture is only one of several Bush business
intertwinings with the dark side, starting way back in 1974, when he
was 28 years old. Like the Soghanalian adventure, each of these tales
has CIA ties, which touch virtually every Bush business venture until
1990.
A mysterious Alaska summer
Neil Bergt, The New York Times’ “richest man in Alaska” in the ’80s,
gave W a summer job in 1974, when he was in between years at Harvard
Business School. Bergt says he doesn’t know why the young Bush–still
living, by his own account, the “wild and woolly days”–wanted to come
to Fairbanks, where the company was based. But a Houston construction
executive contacted him and asked him to hire Bush, who has been
described by professors and friends as an out-to-lunch business
student. Bush’s father was then the chairman of the Republican National
Committee, installed by President Nixon, and Bush Sr. would wind up
that summer appearing on the White House lawn when Nixon resigned,
waved farewell, and climbed aboard the presidential helicopter for the
last time. Bergt concedes that the Bush job was “a political hire.”
In several wide-ranging interviews, Bergt oscillated between demands
that the Voice pay him $250,000 for “the real story” that “only I can
tell” about Bush and insisting that there was “no story here” and that
Bush spent a quiet summer preparing a business plan for him. Asked why
Bush preferred a summer in Alaska to Wall Street or Houston, Bergt
suggested that the motive was nefarious, and that a full account could
affect the election, adding: “I’m not talking without money.”
Bergt’s company, Alaska International Air, certainly has a checkered
history. In 1979, it sold a coveted military cargo plane, a Hercules
C-130, to Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, despite a U.S. ban that
specifically barred the delivery of that particular plane. Bergt
contends he was tricked by the middleman on the $8.6 million
transaction –none other than Sarkis Soghanalian. Soghanalian, who
claims to have never done an arms deal that wasn’t covertly sanctioned
by the CIA, says Bergt, who also has a plethora of CIA ties, was fully
aware that Qaddafi was getting the plane and participated
“voluntarily.”
Ironically, the Bergt plane and two others illicitly sold to Libya were
soon used to invade neighboring Chad and to fly enriched uranium from
Niger for Qaddafi’s fledgling nuclear development program. Bush has
claimed credit recently for convincing Qaddafi to abandon his nuclear
program, and once claimed that Saddam Hussein had received uranium from
Niger as a justification for the war. While another top AIA executive,
Gary White, says he met Soghanalian in Geneva on a couple occasions and
even stayed in his Florida mansion, Bergt just had lunch with him in
San Diego.
“Gosh, to find out later that he was an arms merchant,” Bergt now says.
“We had several incidents where we dealt with people and later we’d
read about the things they did in Time magazine,” which was then
exposing CIA covert operations. “We were doing a lot of wild stuff all
over the place,” recalls Bergt, specifically including the period that
W worked there.
Indeed, in September 1975, Bergt says, “I sold a Herc to Idi Amin for
$10 million,” celebrating decades later that he made the African despot
“pay through the nose.” Bergt acknowledged that there were “some CIA
guys surrounding the deal with Idi,” just as he acknowledges that AIA,
under its prior incarnation as Interior Airways, was doing CIA-tied
business back to 1968–69. “I wasn’t a CIA proxy company,” says Bergt,
referring to airlines that were actually no more than fronts for the
agency. “I just wished I was.” One of his pilots recalled that Bergt
actually bought planes from CIA firms like Southern Air Transport.
The very summer that W worked at the company, it was participating in
the most secret and expensive CIA venture ever, the Glomar Explorer.
The agency spent a half- billion dollars on what congressional critics
called a boondoggle for billionaire Howard Hughes: the construction of
a ship the length of three football fields with a giant clawed arm
designed to dive 17,000 feet to bring a sunk Soviet sub to the surface.
In early August, the Glomar dropped the sub and shattered it on the
ocean floor off the Alaskan coast. White remembers doing an airdrop to
supply the Glomar, and Bergt says that W “may have made some runs with
us”–though he adds that he didn’t even know Bush was a pilot.
When the senior Bush was vice president in 1986 and his aides were
deeply involved in supplying the Contras in Nicaragua, Bergt’s airline,
renamed MarkAir, did at least a half-dozen runs to a dirt strip in
Honduras hauling aid, some of it in sealed containers, for the rebels.
“If it’s guns and ammunition, I could care less,” Bergt told reporters
at the time. Again, Soghanalian and the CIA were also deeply involved
in the Contra traffic. The Anchorage Daily News reported that at least
two of the flights were not registered with customs, avoiding the
requirement of “an export declaration of everything” aboard.
Bergt even offered to regale the Voice with stories of “drug running
and Iran-Contra.” A day later, he called his own offer “absolute
bullshit,” though he insisted that the Anchorage paper already
intimated both in connection with his company. He branded the stories,
which a Voice search of years of the Anchorage paper’s clips could not
locate, as “claptrap” and “yellow journalism.” Coincidentally, when
Bush answered questions about his own alleged cocaine involvement
during the 2000 campaign, he implicitly suggested that 1974 might be
the last year he did drugs, claiming that he could’ve filled out a
federal questionnaire about illegal drugs going back 15 years prior to
his father’s presidency.
Bergt recalls the senior Bush calling him after his son’s summer there
at least once, and says Neil Bush attended a 1988 fundraiser he hosted
in his Anchorage home for the Bush presidential campaign. A check of
federal election records indicates that Bergt, who’s also contributed
lesser amounts to W’s campaign, raised at least $6,500 for the 1988
campaign. One of Bergt’s brothers works for the Federal Aviation
Administration and his son-in-law is the Interior Department official
in charge of overseeing the Alaska pipeline. There is no indication
that political influence was involved with obtaining either job.
A couple of weeks before the 2000 election, the Times first reported
about W’s Alaska summer, calling it a chapter that “has largely escaped
attention,” omitted, unlike five other summer jobs, from his
autobiography. Bergt said then that his CIA reputation was undeserved,
but in fact, even though Bush’s summer there precedes by 18 months his
father’s rise to CIA director, the company has a legion of agency ties.
That would become a W pattern.
The Texas CIA connections
Michael Moore made James Bath famous. A former National Guardsman in
W’s champagne unit in the ’70s, the Houston-based Bath mysteriously
became the U.S. representative for the bin Laden family shortly after
the senior Bush became CIA head in 1976. Bath was also one of the
initial investors in Arbusto, W’s first energy company venture, in
1978, kicking in $50,000. What Moore didn’t say, but Houston Post
reporters John Mecklin and Pete Brewton “independently confirmed,” was
that Bath himself “had some connections to the CIA.” In his only known
interview on the subject, Bath “equivocated” with Craig Unger, author
of House of Bush, House of Saud, saying there are “all sorts of degrees
of civilian participation in the CIA” and those that do it don’t talk
about it. A former Bath business partner says Bath told him he was CIA.
Bath also became the U.S. representative of Khalid bin Mahfouz, the
largest shareholder in the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce
International, the biggest bank fraud in history and springboard for
the Islamic terrorist nightmare of today. Countless news stories and
books have documented the myriad of connections between Harken Energy
and the Saudi-dominated BCCI, which was also pivotal in financing
illegal arms sales to Saddam.
Bush helped arrange a $25 million cash infusion for Harken in 1987
through Arkansas investment banker Jackson Stephens, who’d helped guide
BCCI’s acquisitions in America, to secure financing for Harken, which
had acquired Bush’s failed company and made him a six-figure director.
Stephens arranged for two BCCI-tied investors to bail the company out:
the Union Bank of Switzerland, a BCCI partner in a third bank; and
Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose Saudi Finance Co. was partly controlled by
BCCI shareholders.
When BCCI exploded in scandal in 1991, the senior Bush tried to
distance himself from any knowledge of the bank or its principals, even
though a top White House aide, Ed Rogers, was put on a $600,000
retainer by one of the bank’s founders, Kamel Adham. Bush denied even
knowing Adham, who was the head of Saudi intelligence when Bush ran the
CIA. But Soghanalian told the Voice that the two “were friends a long
time ago,” adding that George H.W. Bush “can say whatever he wants.”
Soghanalian says he “escorted” Adham to a 1976 meeting with Bush at the
Waldorf Astoria, where Adham had a whole floor for five days. “This is
when they were organizing the BCCI bank stuff,” says Soghanalian,
refusing to discuss it any further.
When Bush Sr. said, “I don’t know anything about this man (Adham)
except I’ve read bad stuff about him,” Time reporters Jonathan Beaty
and S.C. Gwynne wrote in their book, The Outlaw Bank, that they were
sure the president had told “a certifiable lie” and got White House
reporters to ask the press office about it. They were “incredulous”
when the press office confirmed the disavowal. Adham himself said: “It
is not possible for the president to say that,” insisting that Bush had
indicated a day later that he did know Adham but that the newspapers
refused to print it. Adham wound up pleading guilty on BCCI charges, as
did Mahfouz, who paid $225 million in restitution and penalties.
Papa Bush’s direct links to BCCI–noted CIA historian Joe Trento, also
of the National Security News Service, wrote that as CIA director, he
“joined a Saudi prince to create” it–apparently explain the bank’s
willingness to throw money at Harken shortly after it bought out
Junior’s busted Arbusto. The Harken bailout is the last in a series of
business ties between W and his father’s onetime agency, though
biographers have noted that W’s campaigns, like his father’s, have
attracted ex-CIA types. When Jimmy Carter replaced the senior Bush at
the CIA in 1977, the new director, Stansfield Turner, forced hundreds
of agents out, and many joined forces with Bush as a kind of
out-of-power CIA clique. That group continued to function unofficially
for years, even rising to the fore in the Iran-Contra days of the late
’80s.
As W has dallied for months with the CIA reformation promised after the
9-11 Commission report, his own historic ties to the agency may assume
greater importance, should he get a second term.
Research assistance: Eric Cantor, Deborah S. Esquenazi, Emily Keller,
Eric Magnuson, and Ben Reiter