Coming on Strong?

Kevin Steel
February 13, 2006
The Western Standard
Original Source: http://www.westernstandard.ca/website/index.cfm?page=article&article_id=1430

Not many people would try eliciting sympathy from a Texas judge by claiming they had been unfairly kidnapped in another country while on the lam from American authorities. But Tongsun Park, the notorious political greaser, has nothing, if not chutzpah. This is the man, after all, who once took two million dollars in cash from Saddam Hussein, and drove all the way to Jordan with it stuffed in the trunk of his car. And, true to style, Park was fleeing an arrest warrant related to the oil-for-food corruption scandal, flying from Canada to Panama, when he was arrested on an Interpol warrant on Jan. 6 at a Mexico City stopover. From there, he was escorted to Houston, where, on Jan. 11, he was refused bail, and the 71-year-old Park was shipped off to prison in New York. 
Park faces an indictment in the Southern District of New York, alleging he acted as the unregistered agent of a foreign government, as well as charges of wire fraud and money laundering in the oil-for-food scandal at the United Nations. Set up in 1996, oil-for-food was supposed to replace sanctions against Iraq by allowing Saddam Hussein to sell some of his oil in exchange for food and medicine. Instead, Hussein skimmed an estimated US$10 billion off the US$64-billion program, and used his oil sales to fund kickbacks and bribes for friends and allies in Europe, the UN and elsewhere. 
Hussein had allegedly hired Park in 1992 to bribe UN officials and corrupt the program. When the final report of the UN's Volcker commission investigating the oil-for-food scandal was released in September, it confirmed that Park had given $1 million to Canadian Maurice Strong, special adviser to the secretary-general of the world body. Now that Park has been arrested, UN-watchers are wondering what he'll say about Strong--and whether Strong, mentor to Liberal Leader Paul Martin, might be the next one hauled in. 
The odds are good that Park will be looking to give up whatever goods he has, says Scott Newark, the former director of operations for the Investigative Project in Washington, where he briefed American congressional investigators on Canadian involvement in oil-for-food. Unlike in Canada, adds Newark, a former Alberta prosecutor, U.S. authorities hand down tough sentences, but they're also keen to bargain. When it comes to oil-for-food operators such as Park, Newark isn't expecting any heroics. I would count on the usual inclinations of guys like this to look after their own skin, he says. 
For his part, Strong has maintained that the $1 million, which Park personally delivered to him less than a week after picking up the money from Hussein, was part of a business deal, and testified before the Volcker commission, that he received no personal benefit from it. The Volcker commission, run by former U.S. treasury secretary Paul Volcker, a personal appointee of Annan's, disagreed. In 1997, Strong's son was running a junior oil play, Cordex Petroleum Inc., out of Calgary, and Strong had personally guaranteed the capital of some investors. When one New Yorker asked to pull out, the report noted, it was Park who helped Strong cover his obligation to the investor. In short, it was thanks to a cash infusion originating from the Butcher of Baghdad that Strong was off the hook. 
The commission also confirmed that Strong had met with Samir Vincent, the Iraqi-American businessman who pleaded guilty in January 2004 to working as an agent for Hussein whose job was to sabotage the oil-for-food program. U.S. authorities have alleged that Park and Vincent were a team. But what remains undetermined, and what Park's case will likely shed some light on, is what kind of influence, if any, Park and Vincent were able to bring to bear on the UN program through their frequent meetings with Strong, and through former secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whom they had also targeted. 
There are many questions about what sort of things Strong was up to as the scandal unfolded. For instance, Boutros-Ghali's successor, Kofi Annan, when he took office in 1997, had assigned Strong specifically the task of implementing reforms at the UN. One of the reforms was a restructuring of the oil-for-food program, including the creation of the Office of the Iraq Programme. The result of the new arrangement meant that UN officials running the oil-for-food program would now report directly to the secretary-general's office, rather than to the UN Security Council, which had originally been tasked with overseeing the program. That shift of control may have greatly contributed to the deterioration of the oil-for-food program into a con game. Meanwhile, the Volcker commission reported that Strong had also, for some reason, insinuated himself into the process of selecting a new chief weapons inspector in Iraq that same year to replace the outgoing Rolf Ekeus--though it was not part of Strong's job responsibilities. Richard Butler would eventually be appointed to replace Ekeus, and would prove himself to be the most potent and thorough inspector the UN would have, frequently infuriating the Iraqi administration. But the Volcker report notes that when Richard Butler's name was raised as a possible candidate to succeed Mr. Ekeus, Mr. Strong registered his disapproval with the secretary-general. 
The Volcker commission declined to release many of the documents related to Strong's involvement in the Iraq file. That has left a lot of gaps in the story about the extent of Strong's dealings with Vincent and Park, as well as the incident over the appointment of a new weapons inspector. Those details could be filled in soon enough if Park, like Vincent, his alleged partner-in-crime, cops a plea and starts spilling details to U.S. prosecutors. 
He's done it before. Park emerged as a key player in Washington's Koreagate scandal in 1976, which saw South Korea's intelligence service funnelling bribes to congressmen to influence U.S. foreign policy. The man who looked after the bribing was Park. After he was initially questioned about Koreagate, Park fled the U.S. and eventually wound up back in South Korea. He cut a deal with U.S. prosecutors--against the objections of his own government--testifying against the lawmakers he had corrupted in exchange for immunity. Now elderly and ailing (he's reportedly on 10 different medications), Park is likely even less eager to confront a difficult trial, let alone the five years in prison he now faces. 
There are other reasons, besides Park's declining health, that American authorities will likely be pressing hard to quickly get at others tied to the scandal. In the end, testimonies from suspects like Park may be all they have to go on, since, so far, the UN has been reluctant to hand over physical evidence related to oil-for-food. Now, Newark's Washington sources say the world body has plans to destroy by March 31 all documentation compiled by Volcker's investigation. There's still tons and tons of material that congressional investigators and criminal prosecutors have not been able to get their hands on, that is probably awaiting the shredders somewhere at the UN, says Newark. Stuff, he says confidently, that we know has Maurice Strong's name all over it.