Dick Eastman
The Bush - Cheny - Giffen - Kazakhstan link: (Cont'd)
Sun Oct 21 00:37:00 2001


Nazarbayev's regime was quick to cooperate with the first Bush
Administration's plans to denuclearize the breakaway Soviet republics; more
than a thousand warheads that had been deployed by the Kremlin in Kazakhstan
at the height of the Cold War were sent back to Russia, without incident.
The CLinton Administration's initial approach was to emphasize the building
of democratic institutions -- a largely futile effort--but it soon turned to
security issues, such as reducing drug trafficking. Diplomacy concentrated
for the most part on providing opportunities for American oil companies
seeking to do business in Kazakhstan, and on plans to build pipelines that
would allow the new republics to deliver their oil and natural gas directly
to the West by way of a Black Sea port in Turkey, thus bypassing both
Russia, to the north, and Iran, to the south.

AMerican officials say that Nazarbayev has misappropriated hundreds of
millions of dollars. He has also shared generously the perrequisites of his
office (as he defined them) with his immediate family. His eldest daughter,
Dariga, controls the national televeision network, and a son-in-law is the
presidnet of a state oil-and-gas pipeline. The country has not prospered
under Nazarbayev's rule. Social conditions have deteriorated steadily;
per-capita G.N.P. is just thirteen hundred dollars a year. The nation is
so burdened with an external debt of more than eight billion dollars, and
with a huge and rapidly growing level of capital flight: a fifth of the
country's total money supply is now stashed in Swiss banks. Nonetheless,
Nazarbayev has been viewed by many in Washington not as a despot but as a
charismatic political leader who could hold his nation together.

According to William Courtney, who was the first American Ambassador to
Kazakhstan, Nazarbayev became "more authoritarian as his power grew, and
came to depend on Jim Giffen more and more." By 1995, Courtney syas,
"Nazarbayev had inserted Giffen as an indispensable go-between for some key
projects."

IN the late nineteen-eighties, Giffen had helped Chevron buy into the
Tengiz field. But a new president of Chevron's overseas division, Richard
Matxke, decided not to deal further with Giffen, and Chevron's relationships
inside Kazakhstan quickely soured. Matzke is said to have proudly told one
colleague that his company "didn't pay a nickle" in middleman's fees after
getting into Tengiz. However, Giffen subsequently demanded a "success" fee
and received it -- seven and a half cents per barrel of Chevron's share of
the Tengiz oil. It earned him millions of dollars in royalties --at least
three million last year alone.

More and more, Kazakhstan insiders told me, Giffen's power became tied to
his ability to help Nazarbayev and his government cronies, including Nurlan
Balgymbayev, the oil-and-gas minister, benefit from the oil business.
Balgymbayev, wh was named as a defendant in Tabbah's suit, began his career,
in the nineteen-seventies, as an engineer in the Soviet oil fields. He
became friendly in those years with Viktor Chernomyrdin and the other men
who created Gazprom, the powerful Russian energy consortium. In 1994, after
an unhappy year with Chevron, Balgymbayev was appointed Kazakhstan's
oil-and-gas minister. He routinely told foreign oil companies seeking to do
business in Kazakhstan that any prosepctive deal had to involve Giffen and
Mercator, which had offices there.

Dan White, a former ARCO executive, siad that when, in late 1995, he
arrived to open an ARCO office in the former Soviet Union a senior American
diplomat in Kazakhstan told him, "The best way to get what you want is to
see Giffen." One afternoon, White happened to encounter the Kazakh oil
minister in a hotel lobby. They exchanged a few pleasantries, and then
Balgymbayev raced off to the airport. At that moment, White recalled, "the
fellow next to him says, 'I'm Jim Giffen,'" and told him, "Dan, nobody gets
to Balgymbayev without coming through me." Giffen paused, White told me,
and said, "You know this is a strange place here. A lot of people carry
guns, and bad things happen to people."

(end of excerpt, at end of page 51 of an article that continues to p.
65) The New Yorker article must be the starting point for any
man seeing to expose the true authors of the crashbombing terror
acts of September 11th, the Great Frame-Up.

Dick Eastman - eastman@wolfenet.co
Yakima, Washington
Every man is responsible to every other man.

• "out of chaos comes ORDER... — LB Bork, Sun Oct 21 00:48