Russia's Kommersant on the Weldon investigation:

Kommersant’s sources believe the probe might bring trouble to many people in Moscow which Weldon visited “no less than 30 times”. The sources claim that “the congressman’s main contacts in Moscow were high-ranking law enforcement officials from Russia’s Defense Ministry and Federal Security Service, and deputies of the State Duma.”

This might be confirmed by the fact that Curt Weldon is the founder of the International Exchange Group (IEG) non-governmental organization. In 2005, IEG offered the project to guard six Russian sites for production and storage of biological weapons to the Pentagon. Together with Weldon, Alexander Kotenkov, Russian president’s representative in the Federation Council, heads the political council of IEG. The NGO’s trustees are the representatives of Russian State Duma committees on defense and security Viktor Zavarzin and Vladimir Vasilyev, Vice-Chair of the Federation Council committee on defense and security Alexey Alexandrov, Deputy Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexey Bortnikov, Russian General Staff Commander Yuri Baluyevsky, and Duma’s First Vice-Speaker Lyubov Sliska.

Those are some contacts. The vision of Russian FSB agents paling at the thought of Weldon being investigated is striking.

Here's how Weldon described the International Exchange Group in Congress March 9, 2005:

I want to say to you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ranking Member, 2 years ago the minister of atomic energy from Russia, Rumyantsev, and the leading nuclear scientists in Russia, my good friend Velikhov, who runs the Kurchatov Institute, told me that they could work on an arrangement where the United States and Russia would have joint ownership of any fuel going into Bashir. Why didn't we take advantage of that?

Those are the kind of questions we have to ask. I mean instead of that, we have gotten assurances from Russia, but now we have Russia supplying energy. So over the past 2 years, what we have tried to do with a group of Members of Congress, is establish a new relationship into the inner-circle of Putin's leadership team. It would be like dealing with Carl Rove and Andy Card.

I will leave for the record documents from the International Exchange Group, established by Putin's Plenipotentiary representative to the Duma and the Federation Council. His name is Alexander Kotenkov.

That relationship includes on its board the Deputy Director of the FSB, the Chairman of the Security Committee of the Federation Council, Aleksei Alexandrov, the Chairman of the Security Council of the Duma, Vladimir Vasilyev, and it includes the key people who are personally friendly with Putin.

Through that effort, I have proposed to the Administration that we take two of four actions, which I would like to outline briefly for you today, that I think can bring Russia back into the fold.

The first is we need to terminate Jackson-Vanik immediately. Every major Jewish group has come out and written me letters: National Council of Soviet Jewry, AIPAC, and Jinsa. ...

The second is, expand cooperative threat reduction. Nunn-Lugar is not enough. We need to go beyond Nunn-Lugar to get at sites that Russia has not been willing to give us access to in the past, both biological sites and nuclear sites.

Through this effort that I just outlined to you—the International Exchange Group—I took a delegation of two democrats, Soloman Ortiz and Silvestre Reyes, a year ago in August, to Krasnyarsk 26.

We went into the mountain in Siberia and went down to the site of the three largest plutonium-producing reactors. We had no help from the State Department, no help from the Energy Department, no help from the Defense Department. We did it directly with this Russian group that is close to Putin.

We need a new approach to getting access to sites that Russia has not been willing to give us access to. Right now in the Pentagon and the State Department, there is a proposal to do two pilot programs through the IEG.

One of them is to access six biological sites, some of which we have not been given access to in the past, out of 79 that Russia has identified to us.

We need to proceed and this Committee could help move that process along within the State Department. It is a low dollar item.

The second is—and that is the third initiative that I have in my document—expand cooperation with Russia on missile defense. When we moved out of the ABM Treaty, I was the author of that bill that passed the House. My statements were that we should do this only by cooperating with Russia to allay their concerns about trying to achieve a strategic superiority over them. ...

The fourth initiative I think is the most exciting. I proposed, and this Committee could be a big help here, that we empower our President and the Russian President to do something that is similar to the old Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission. Do you remember that in the Clinton era?

Now the current Administration doesn't like to talk about Gore-Chernomyrdin because it is not the in thing to talk about, but I think the model is a good model and what I have proposed is that we announce and establish a United States-Russian free energy trade agreement.

Russia has tons of energy. We have tons of need. Russia can't get their energy to the marketplace. We have the technology to get it to the marketplace and to help them extract it.

The Russian private energy industry is already investing in America. Lukoil, chaired by Alexperov, bought 2,000 Getty gas stations. When I was in Moscow in the fall, they cut a deal with Conoco Phillips to buy another 1,800 gas stations.

So Lukoil now owns 3,800 gas stations in America. They are already investing in our country. Itera, a Russian energy company, is based in Jacksonville, Florida, for 12 years.

What we need is a strategic Presidential-level task force on fossil fuel energy cooperation. That also sends a signal to Saudi Arabia and the Middle Eastern countries that we have alternative sources of energy that we can turn to, and it brings together a strategic relationship on energy that we can benefit from and that Russia can benefit from, but it has got to go beyond fossil fuels.

It has got to include nuclear energy. The peaceful use of nuclear power, bringing our energy ministry together with the Russian ministry of atomic energy and institutes like Kurchatov, linked up with Los Alamos and Sandias and Livermore and they are already doing some work, but in a strategic way so that we can do joint work on energy initiatives in the nuclear arena. ...

If we put together an outline, a vision of a strategic energy relationship, if we take the other three steps I have advocated, expanding cooperative threat reduction, joint missile defense cooperation and elevating Russia out of Jackson-Vanik, you have just given Putin a political homerun back in Moscow.

Here's a Defense Department, Defense Threat Reduction Agency bulletin (.pdf) from March 2005 saying that Weldon was seeking Defense Department/DTRA funding in the low millions for the International Exchange Group. More here.

Posted by Laura at October 18, 2006 04:15 PM