Trading with the Enemy
How Donald Rumsfeld Helped Kim Jong IL
Get His Nukes -- For a Fee
by
Ron Reed
Dissident Voice
February 23, 2003
[Author's note: The
following article is a revision and update of an article written last October,
when the "North Korean threat" was first being brandished in the news
media, featuring an apparently fabricated "admission" by the
government of that country that it had nuclear weapons. At the time, it was
circulated to several online media and a couple of well-known left journals,
but remained unpublished. The recent Common Dreams link to a mainstream Swiss
site containing a gloss on Rumsfeld's connection to ABB ("Rumsfeld was on
ABB Board During Nuclear Deal with North Korea," by Jacob Greber,
published on Friday, February 21, 2003 by SwissInfo - Swiss Radio
International; http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0221-08.htm),
along with the requisite denials and stonewalling, seemed to me to give the
story "legs," and to call for a little more in-depth reporting.]
Many
years ago, I read a "quotation" attributed to Lenin in a spread on
Soviet Communism that made the cover of Life Magazine on the fiftieth anniversary
of the October revolution. The article referred to him as "Nikolai"
Lenin instead of V.I. or Vladimir, and included the famous fabricated quote
about needing to break eggs to make omelets, so I have no idea whether the
reference is authentic.
The quote, which at any rate
sounded like the sort of cynical quip Lenin was noted for, was words to the
effect that when it came time to hang the capitalists, they'd sell the rope to
do the job. The recent news about North Korea's nuclear program has brought it vividly
back into focus.
In all the mainstream news
hooks and fatuous columns about the perfidy of the North Korean regime, and the
Russian, Chinese and even Pakistani involvement in giving them the Bomb--the
last played down as much as possible--little or nothing has been written about
U.S. and corporate involvement, aside from the obligatory excoriations of Clinton
for his "naiveté," or "policy blunders," in allowing the
Koreans to have a peaceful nuclear program at all, rather than just bombing the
place off the map. But the technology didn't just grow out of the barren soil
of the Stalinist camp, despite the official policy of "juche" or
self-reliance that Kim Jong Il inherited from his father; rather, it was
supplied by corporations eager to make a buck off the enterprise.
One of these was the giant Swedish-Swiss
engineering firm Asea Brown Boveri, based in Norwalk, Conn., which was issued a
permit around May 1996 under DOE Regulation 10 CFR Part 810. ABB's wholly owned
subsidiary ABB Combustion Engineering Nuclear Systems, or C-E, was
"authorized to provide a broad range of technology, equipment, and
services for the design, construction, operation, and maintenance of the two
[light water] reactors to be built in North Korea," according to DOE
release R-96-070, dated May 16, 1996. (The release can be found at www.fas.org/news/dprk/1996/pr96070.html) According to the release,
"[t]he North Korean reactors will be based largely on C-E
technology," which powers the reactors in South Korea used by the prime
contractor.
Nor was the investment of
ABB a one-time deal; as late as December 2000, according to the Korea
WebWeekly, as quoted in the Asia Times column "Pyongyang Watch," by
Aidan Foster-Carter, "[i]n the first unambiguous sign that North Korea
really does plan to rejoin the planet, a major global corporation is taking the
plunge and going in. Asea Brown Boveri, the Swedish-Swiss engineering
multinational, is to undertake nothing less than the modernization of North
Korea's entire national electricity grid. The short-term difficulties for ABB
will be considerable but the long-term rewards could be immense."
Foster-Carter adds that
"neither party was generous with the details," so "the scale and
value of the contract is not revealed. But this is clearly a very big deal,
covering nothing less than the modernization of North Korea's entire national
electricity grid." The grid will need to be upgraded in order to handle
the light water reactors, according to Foster-Carter, which raises "doubts
whether nuclear power is viable or appropriate" to North Korea's needs. (www.atimes.com/koreas/BL13Dg02.html)
[Note: According to the Swiss article, ABB had "in early 2000" sold its
nuclear division to the British firm BNFL group.]
Of course, the contracts
between ABB and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea were perfectly legal,
despite the risk of diversion of the fissile materials into a secret weapons
program. And while ABB has recently been characterized as the "Enron of
Europe," with vast pension funds voted by its board to its last two CEOs
even as the stock fell precipitously (on news of previously unacknowledged
asbestos liabilities and creative bookkeeping), and as 12,000 workers were
being laid off, it wasn't always thus.
Just like Enron, at one time
the company was widely regarded as the model of the new multinational, and held
a reputation as one of the more environmentally responsible companies in
Europe, winning awards from mainstream environmentalist organizations during
the early Nineties--this despite its record as a chief polluter in Poland and
as one of the prime constructors of the environmentally devastating Three
Gorges Dam in China, among other horrors. (It was also the prime contractor for
the Bakun Dam in Malaysia, indefinitely postponed following protests by
non-governmental organizations there as well as over 200 international
environmental and human rights groups, and for the Ilisu hydropower project on
the Tigris river in Turkey, which critics claim violates core provisions of the
1997 UN Convention on the Non-Navigational Uses of Transboundary Watercourses.)
(www.corpwatch.org/campaigns/PCD.jsp?articleid=3388)
So, you say, another greedy
and amoral company involved in making a quick buck by selling strategically
useful technology to a rogue state -- what else is new? Well, welcomed to the
ABB board of directors on Feb. 28, 1996--before the contract with North Korea
was signed--was none other than "former U.S. Ambassador to NATO" and
"former President and CEO of G.D. Searle & Co., Chicago, USA, and
former US Secretary of Defense," one Donald H. Rumsfeld.
In 1998, Mr. Rumsfeld chaired
a blue ribbon commission that made headlines with its findings that, in the
words of a report in the Nation by William Hartung, "given enough foreign
help, a rogue state like North Korea could acquire a missile capable of
reaching the United States within five years of making a decision to do
so--one-third to one-half the warning time projected in the CIA's official
estimates."
The report, denounced by
many news organizations for unwarranted alarmism, was fulsomely praised and
adopted by the war party and the missile defense crowd in the editorial pages
of the Wall Street Journal, and elicited hysterical cries from then-House
Speaker Newt Gingrich that it was the "most important warning about our
national security system since the end of the cold war." In the usual
manner by which right-wing disinformation and outright mendacity becomes the
"received wisdom" of the mainstream press, it was then duly endorsed
by Washington's "newspaper of record," the Post, as "useful and
plausible," thus contributing to the life support system of the
Anti-Ballistic Missile at a time when it was on its last legs--resuscitating it
just long enough to last until the incoming Bush-Rumsfeld administration could
feed it the treaty that had up till then prevented its full development and
deployment.
Thus at the same time as
Consigliere Cheney, then chair of Haliburton, was making nice with Saddam
Hussein in the interest of feeding at the trough of oil field repair (the
necessity of which stemmed from Cheney's Defense Department's illegal bombings
during the previous Gulf slaughter), "Rummy," the chief promoter of
demonization of foreign regimes that don't toe the American line (even longtime
allies like Germany), and the Secretary of Defense who last year stoutly defended
President Bush's characterization of North Korea as part of an "axis of
evil," either tacitly or openly approved the sale by a foreign-owned
transnational corporation of the very technology that helped them develop
whatever nuclear weapons capacity they now have, even as he was, for public
consumption, denouncing "foreign help" in that development.
Of course, the Swiss article
demurs that because, according to a spokesman for ABB, board protocols are
never released to the public, there's no way to know whether this 'relatively
minor' $200 million contract ("so to speak, a smaller one") even came
up while Rummy helped oversee the company. And Rumsfeld himself, following the
advice of his mentor Richard Nixon, discussing how to get away with perjury ("You
can always say you don't recall, you don't remember..."), has said through
a spokesperson that he "does not recall it being brought before the board
at any time."
Still, Rumsfeld served as a
board member of ABB throughout the entire period of the contracts, attending
virtually all its quarterly meetings, until he was tapped by Bush XLIII
Illegitimus for Defense Secretary in Feb. 2001. Moreover, he also served during
that time on the board of its parent holding company ABB AB, indicating, as
does the fulsome praise accompanying the initial announcement of his election
to the board, that he was considered a major asset rather than a mere time
server.
This term of service
includes the date that Aidan-Foster's article appeared, with its hyperbolic
prose about a major new era in the DPRK's relations with "the planet"
("nothing less than," "could be immense," "very big
deal"). Since Rumsfeld was publicly on the record denouncing the regime
with which his company was then negotiating to modernize the entire North
Korean grid, and the article was prominently displayed in one of the most
important business journals in Asia, it strains credulity far past the breaking
point to claim that no one thought to bring it to his attention.
Just as with Iraq, where "Rummy" was dispatched to Baghdad in 1983 by Ronald Reagan to give "another Hitler," as he now characterizes the then-"Iraqi strongman" Saddam Hussein, a pair of golden spurs along with his personal assurances that the U.S. supported the Iraqi regime in whatever measures it felt obliged to take in order to defeat Iran (such support including the providing of targeting assistance to ensure that Saddam's gas attacks wreaked maximum carnage), so with Korea: The demon du jour is the business or strategic partner of another, or even the same, day. Rumsfeld, whom Kissinger called the most ruthless man he had ever met, is an authentic American version of the Nazi minister and businessman Hermann Goering, lacking only the latter's charisma. Unfortunately, the prospects of his facing a Nuremburg-style tribunal, especially with the U.S. sabotage of the International Criminal Court, appear slim to nonexistent.
Ron Reed is an unrepentant Sixties activist and avid student of history, presently
living in Dillingham, Alaska, and working on getting his secondary teaching
certificate.
Email: geometry1@indiatimes.com