Lawyers, Nukes, and Money: The Strange Case of Weldon's Russia Plan

[kpete]

Lawyers, Nukes, and Money: The Strange Case of Weldon's Russia Plan
By Sharon Weinberger June 11, 2008

While there have been a number of articles and blogs written about the IEG-Weldon connection, one thing that's been missing is any information on how far Weldon and the group got with this scheme. Meaning, did anyone in government jump on board? The quick answer: Yes.
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Two years ago, Weldon was more than happy to talk about this relationship, and even handed over a sheaf of documents to us about IEG and Petrosyan, including this letter from Petrosyan, promising to help Weldon save the world from Iran and North Korea. Here's a snippet of what Weldon said as part of a nearly three-hour interview about his involvement with Russia and the International Exchange Group:

I had a group of Russians approach me two years ago, three years ago through David Vitter, a U.S. senator. He was then a house member. One of David’s best friends from childhood is a lawyer named Claude Kelly. He said, David Vitter said, "Spend some time with these guys: they have some ideas about Russia and they want to talk to you." They bring a delegation; Vitter with them. They introduced themselves as representative of a man, Kotenkov. He worked in the equivalent in West Wing. Kotenkov sent them over here to establish a new relationship between the United States and Russia, directly involving Putin’s inner circle. They tell me, "If you pursue this: you can get access to any sites you want in Russia, you can get cooperation with any project in Russia. We’ll give you access the inner circle of President Putin."

(The part about the former CIA lawyer being involved was something Weldon repeated twice.)

The way it would work, according to Weldon, is that IEG would serve as a buffer between the U.S. and Russian governments. Meaning, IEG would take responsibility for managing nonproliferation projects and getting access to closed WMD sites -- or so went the plan -- and then the U.S. government would reimburse IEG at the end for the work completed. No money would go directly to Russia's weapons labs. Weldon argued this would avoid corruption, because current nonproliferation funds that go to Russia's labs are siphoned off, but since IEG was openly controlled by Putin's inner circle, IEG sounded a lot like a "pay for access" scheme. Or, more cynically, one could say that as opposed to siphoning 10 percent off the top, IEG was proposing to take 100 percent. But Weldon believed, or at least argued, that this was a better alternative. "I don’t want to do anything illegal, but I want to get access to weapons of mass destruction sites," he said.

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We discuss the details of this in our book (along with our trip to Russia to see first hand the progress with nonproliferation programs). And tomorrow we'll also post on DANGER ROOM the actual signed contract, worth nearly $100 million, that IEG concluded with a government agency.

more at:
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/06/lawyers-nukes-a.html