Word: ambassador
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Saddam launched the scheme after he seized power in 1979, Kroll and other investigators say. Key figures in the family-run scam allegedly included Saddam's half brother Barzan al-Takriti, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, and Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, Iraq's Minister for Oil and Industry. Probers say the conspirators siphoned off 5% of the $200 billion that Iraq accumulated in oil revenues during the past decade. The group also reportedly demanded a 2.5% kickback from Japanese firms that did business in Iraq, and even skimmed off money from contracts between...
What happens, though, if the forces that have combined to steer Gorbachev toward conservatism at home conspire to revive old thinking abroad? Washington may soon know. Barring a last-minute change, Gorbachev's fourth ambassador to the U.S. in six years will be Deputy Foreign Minister Viktor Komplektov, 59, a fluent English speaker and classic old-school hard-liner. A Carter Administration aide who negotiated a fair amount of SALT II with Komplektov describes him as "having spent many years developing a reputation for calculated nastiness. He was charming enough when it suited his purposes, but across the table...
Never let it be said that April Glaspie does not know how to suffer in silence. Ever since Iraq invaded Kuwait last August, the Bush Administration has tried to make Glaspie, then the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, the scapegoat for Washington's prewar policy of appeasing Saddam Hussein. That was easy to do, since Glaspie was prohibited from giving her version of the infamous meeting she had in Baghdad with the Iraqi dictator a week before the invasion. Iraq leaked a doctored transcript in September quoting Glaspie as saying that the U.S. had "no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts...
...allowed to return to Baghdad. When the Iraqi transcript was made public, State Department officials said omissions had been made but it was basically accurate. Asked last fall about Glaspie's instructions for the meeting with Saddam, Secretary of State James Baker made no effort to support his ambassador. "What you want me to do is say that those instructions were sent specifically by me on my specific orders. There are probably 312,000 cables that go out under my name." Although Baker took eight aides to his Jan. 9 meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in Geneva, Glaspie...
...personage of Carter confidant Bert Lance. In deep financial trouble with his National Bank of Georgia and beset by regulators for past banking indiscretions, Lance was all too glad to be put on B.C.C.I.'s payroll as a $100,000-a-year consultant. Abedi declared Lance was his "unofficial ambassador . . . brought in to give us a vision of the U.S." and insisted "we would never talk about exploiting his relationship with the President...