Liberty Letters: You Can Trust a Communist to Be a Communist; KGB Murders Continue; Frist for Mitt?

You Can Trust a Communist to be a Communist

Liberty Letters Quote of the Day: Casper Weinberger Jr. Speaks out on KGB Ordered Hit and the ‘Fall’ of the Soviet Union:
Despite all the hype to the contrary, Mikhail Gorbachev did not usher in a new era of democracy into the former Soviet Union. Simply wearing sharp looking suits and “acting western” does not necessarily change one’s basic ideology. In my view, the Soviet attitudes and desires for world domination have never changed. They just wised up to public perceptions and played upon the media, but nothing in their basic governmental structure has really changed. Now they call themselves Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), but the people are still oppressed and basic freedoms except for the governmental elite are routinely squashed.

In the early 1990s there were many privatization deals especially involving Russian oil and other energy sources. Opportunities for Russian industrialists and individual tycoons appeared to emerge, but the truth is that modern Russia is no democracy, nor any bastion of human freedoms. President Putin is about as much of a president as were the dictators Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein. After the apparent move toward a Western democracy, it was not long before the Russian government decided that private ownership and the profits to individuals that accompanied them were not a formula for restoring power to the Russian state. So much then for democracy. The Russians wanted back what had been lost to certain intelligent and/or lucky individual investors.

Soon, Soviet multi-millionaires, even billionaires, found themselves either under arrest, dead, forced into exile, or sent to gulags in Siberia, stripped of their power and riches almost as quickly as they had obtained them. When Litvinenko, as a KGB agent (and also as an agent for the successor agency, the Federal Security Bureau, or FSB), went public in 1999 with the story that he had refused a direct order to kill the exiled Russian billionaire, Boris Berezovsky, he was thrown in jail for nine months on the charge of abuse of office and was then deported. He took up residence in London, where he was granted asylum in 2000, and continued his public blasts at his former bosses.

Who can say now who is telling the truth and who is not? One thing though that is for certain is that we can trust the Communists to continue being Communists, awash in intrigue, power grabs and a steady secret desire that has never changed: to rule the world and suppress America and all that she stands for. The proof is in the poisoned political atmosphere that can be easily seen in Russia and their “Commonwealth” today.

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Liberty Letters Comment: On the other hand we have President Bush saying of ‘former’ KGB Chief Vladimir Putin: “I shook his hand, I looked into his eyes, and I knew I could trust him.” And now we know why the Republicans have been booted out of power; they betrayed us on all too many fronts, for Compassionate Conservatism means, among other crazy things: blindly forgiving and opening up our arms to lifelong criminals, butchers, and tyrants if it fits into the Establishment’s agenda for a global new world order.

Like Old Times, KGB Murders Continue

Herbert Romerstein writes in today’s Human Events:

The murder in London this week of KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko takes us back to the horrible memories of Soviet murders during the Cold War. Millions were murdered within the Soviet Union, but well-planned selected murders took place in the free world. We hoped that with the collapse of the Soviet Union this sort of thing would end.

An interesting statement was made by a representative of the Russian intelligence service who denied responsibility for the Litvinenko murder. He claimed that the last killing they did abroad was of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the anti-communist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Bandera was assassinated in Munich, Germany, in 1959. He was killed by an exotic poison fired into his face by a KGB assassin. That was the last time the KGB was caught committing a murder. But, there were other strange cases.

In 1978, also in London, the Bulgarian Georgi Markov was killed by a poison pellet fired from an umbrella. The Soviets were suspected, but only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did all the details come out. Former KGB General Oleg Kalugin publicly admitted that he was present when the Bulgarian Communist intelligence service requested that the KGB supply the weapon and the poisons to murder Markov. Kalugin, who opposed the idea, was overruled by his superiors, who provided the murder weapon from the KGB laboratory. We learned then that the laboratory was still in existence producing exotic poisons almost twenty years after the murder of Bandera.

When Litvinenko first became sick, the cause was unknown. More than week went by when toxicology tests revealed small traces of thallium, a lethal poison. After his death the doctors discovered polonium 210, a radioactive substance, in his body. It is possible that nothing could have been done even had he been diagnosed earlier.

In 1957, a KGB defector named Nikolai Khohlov was poisoned in Frankfurt, Germany. Although he was poisoned with radioactive thallium, he survived. He was immediately rushed to a US Army hospital in Germany where he was treated. Possibly the KGB laboratory learned more in the intervening years, and now their poisons are not treatable. Khohlov had been sent to Germany by KGB in 1953 to murder one of the leaders of the Russian anti-communist organization NTS. Instead of carrying out his assignment, he defected to NTS and helped them in their anti-communist work. The attempted assassination was KGB payback.

Khohlov had some of the same symptoms as Litvinenko, extreme weakness and loss of hair. When I met him in 1959, two years after the assassination attempt, much of his hair had grown back and he had regained much of his strength. He was lucky. Litvinenko was not.

Litvinenko had publicly opposed the Russian leader, Putin. He had also denounced the criminal gangs that control the Russian government. The Russian word for these gangs is Mafiya (similar but not exactly the same as the Mafia criminals we know in the West). Russia is ruled by mafiyas that grew out of the organizations of the old communist rulers of Russia. There is a KGB mafiya, a Communist Party mafiya, a Young Communist League mafiya, and even one based on the former Soviet trade unions. Sometimes the mafiyas work together, at other times they have shoot outs on the street. Sometimes they kill one another in the shoot outs. Sometimes innocent people get in the way of their bullets.

Journalists, politicians and others in Russia and parts of the former Soviet empire, who speak out against Russian organized crime or the excesses of the Russian government, have also been murdered.

Western governments and businesses should think twice before trying to deal with these people.
Mr. Romerstein is a former U.S. government official. He served as a professional staff member for the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities/House Committee on Internal Security and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He then headed the Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation at the U.S. Information Agency. He currently teaches propaganda analysis at the Institute for World Politics in Washington, D.C. He is the co-author of “The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors,” published by Regnery.

In Disdain for McCain, Team Frist May Hop on Romney Express

No sooner had the word gone out yesterday that outgoing Sen. Bill Frist (R.-Tenn.) would not seek the Republican nomination for president in ’08 than sources close to the physician-politician were telling me: “Watch where Team Frist goes.” And immediately after saying that, a source close to Frist said: “They’ll go to Romney.”

By “Team Frist,” people close to the senator usually mean Linus Catignani, who headed up Frist’s personal political action committee and is a partner in the Cat-Bond fund-raising company (along with Linda Bond, wife of Missouri Sen. Kit Bond), and Alex Vogel, past chief counsel to Frist and to the National Republican Senatorial Committee when the Tennessee senator was its chairman. In addition, Washington “superlobbyist” Jack Oliver — former deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee and longtime finance director for George W. Bush’s presidential campaign — had been considered a likely player in a Frist-for-President campaign. With Frist out of the ’08 sweepstakes, the Missourian President Bush dubbed “Ollie” is expected to throw his considerable fund-raising weight behind Romney.

Can Frist himself be far behind the “Romney Express” if his top campaign team is poised to hop on? According to the same source that tipped us on “Team Frist,””The Leader [what intimates call Frist] will back Mitt Romney, in part because he can’t stand John McCain.”

Source

Liberty Letters Comment: Keep your eye on Romney. He will emerge as a Republican Party front-runner, and may restore a sense of Reagan-like integrity to the higher echelons of the party.