Word: heslin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Tamraz wanted to build his billion-dollar oil pipeline through the warring nations of Armenia and Azerbaijan. He sought U.S. blessing for the project to help secure financing, and with the aid of some State Department officials, arranged a meeting in June 1995 with NSC Central Asia specialist Sheila Heslin. She was not impressed with his pitch and didn't think the pipeline would ever be built. She told Tamraz that no U.S. approval would be granted, and was alarmed to hear later that he had portrayed himself to potential investors as having some sort of official U.S. backing. Later...
...give up, though. In August and October, at chairman Fowler's suggestion, he sent a total of $100,000 to the Virginia State Democratic Party. In return, says a campaign official, he wanted Fowler to help get him in to see the President. So in December, Fowler called Heslin and asked her to back down on her objections to letting Tamraz in the White House. According to the Journal, he offered to send her a CIA report that would demonstrate that Tamraz had provided the agency with helpful information in the past. And several weeks later, a new CIA report...
...Heslin alerted the NSC to the lobbying by Fowler, and council deputy director Nancy Soderberg called Fowler and told him, in essence, to lay off. She didn't mention the encounter to Lake, thinking the problem was taken care of. So how to account for the fact that in the months that followed, Tamraz visited the White House not once but four more times? It turns out that the fire wall Lake constructed to keep politics out of foreign policy seems to have surrounded only him. His apparent inability to monitor the doings of 151 security-council staff members...