Halliburton, Cheney, Corruption
During the 2000 Vice-Presidential debate, Senator Joseph Lieberman teased Cheney about the fortune he had amassed at Halliburton. “I’m pleased to see, Dick, that you’re better off than you were eight years ago,” he said.
“I can tell you that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it,” Cheney shot back. In fact, despite having spent years championing the private sector and disparaging big government, Cheney devoted himself at Halliburton to securing government funds. In the five years before Cheney joined Halliburton, the company received a hundred million dollars in government credit guarantees. During Cheney’s tenure, this amount jumped to $1.5 billion. One alliance that Cheney worked hard to make was with the Export-Import Bank, in Washington; he won the support of James Harmon, a Clinton appointee and the bank’s chairman. Harmon agreed to make a four-hundred-and-ninety-million-dollar loan guarantee to a Russian company that was drilling a huge oil field in Siberia. It was the largest loan guarantee to a Russian company in the bank’s history, and a big chunk of it would facilitate the Russian company’s purchase of Halliburton’s services. There was a hitch, however: the Russian company, Tyumen Oil, was caught in a messy dispute with several competitors, all of whom accused the others of being corrupt.
Cheney was undeterred by these charges. But he almost lost the Export-Import loan when the State Department attempted to block it, on the ground that Tyumen was involved in illegal activity. According to a source who worked at the State Department at the time, Cheney personally lobbied the government in an effort to keep the deal alive. He was particularly incensed by the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency, which sided with the State Department. According to a friend of Cheney’s, he was convinced that the C.I.A. had been duped by opposition research spread by Tyumen’s rivals. Eventually, the deal went through. By then, though, Cheney’s frustration with government had become profound. As he said in a speech in 1998, “The average Halliburton hand knows more about the world than the average member of Congress.”
In the spring of 2000, Cheney’s two worlds—commerce and politics— merged. Halliburton allowed its C.E.O. to serve simultaneously as the head of George W. Bush’s Vice-Presidential search committee. At the time, Bush said that his main criterion for a running mate was “somebody who’s not going to hurt you.” Cheney demanded reams of documents from the candidates he considered. In the end, he picked himself—a move that his longtime friend Stuart Spencer recently described, with admiration, as “the most Machiavellian fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”
One man who was especially pleased by Cheney’s candidacy was Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi dissident who was the leading proponent of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Cheney had come to know Chalabi through conservative circles in Washington. “I think he is good for us,” Chalabi told a U.P.I. reporter in June, 2000.
For months there has been a debate in Washington about when the Bush Administration decided to go to war against Saddam. In Ron Suskind’s recent book “The Price of Loyalty,” former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill charges that Cheney agitated for U.S. intervention well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Additional evidence that Cheney played an early planning role is contained in a previously undisclosed National Security Council document, dated February 3, 2001. The top-secret document, written by a high-level N.S.C. official, concerned Cheney’s newly formed Energy Task Force. It directed the N.S.C. staff to coöperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states,” such as Iraq, and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”
A source who worked at the N.S.C. at the time doubted that there were links between Cheney’s Energy Task Force and the overthrow of Saddam. But Mark Medish, who served as senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the N.S.C. during the Clinton Administration, told me that he regards the document as potentially “huge.” He said, “People think Cheney’s Energy Task Force has been secretive about domestic issues,” referring to the fact that the Vice-President has been unwilling to reveal information about private task-force meetings that took place in 2001, when information was being gathered to help develop President Bush’s energy policy. “But if this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans.”
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