Oil-for-Food exec a Russian spy

The complicity of Russia in the Oil for Food scandal just got a lot clearer. The man responsible for setting the price of Iraqi oil and oversaw the production and sale of crude was a Russian agent in the SVR, the foreign intelligence service. He won the highest civilian commendation from Vladimir Putin for his penetration of the UN (via Newsbeat1):

A UN official who held a pivotal post in the Oil-for-Food programme for Iraq has been exposed by a defector as a Russian spy who diverted almost half a billion dollars to top Russian officials in “one of the richest heists in world history”.

Alexandre Kramar, who set the price of Iraqi crude as a UN oil overseer from 1996 to 2003, was an undercover agent for Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, his former handler says.

The revelation throws new light on the UN Oil-for-Food scandal, which implicated dozens of politicians, diplomats and businessmen around the world, as well as the UN official overseeing the programme, and the son of the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

It provides fresh evidence of Russia’s complicity in helping Saddam Hussein to circumvent UN sanctions imposed after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The crumbling of the UN embargo, which was designed to prevent Iraq from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction, was one of the factors behind the US and British decision to go to war in 2003.

Kramar got unmasked not because of any investigation into the Oil-for-Food scam, but because his SVR handler in New York defected over seven years ago and revealed it in an upcoming book. Sergei Tretyakov considers Kramar his best operative during his career as SVR station chief in Manhattan, and for good reason: he turned a healthy profit. While he helped run the OFF program, Kramar delivered over $500 million in kickbacks to Russian government officials, during the administrations of both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.

Russia, one will recall, bitterly opposed the efforts by the US to invade Iraq. Along with France, the Russians had deeply commercial reasons for their efforts to keep the status quo in place. With their spy in place and a tap into the flow of Iraqi crude, the Russians would never have a chance to profit like that in an open market. They needed Saddam in place, brutally oppressing his own people, so that Russia and Saddam could steal the money that was supposed to feed the Iraqis who suffered under the heavy economic sanctions that supposedly put Saddam in a “box”.

The use of a spy to subvert the UN OFF program is a breathtakingly cynical and morbidly evil act by Russia. It would never have been discovered, either, without the invasion that toppled Saddam and exposed the OFF fraud in 2003. Russia, with its deliberate and official manipulation of the program, kept Saddam in power and made it necessary to have a military intervention. Had the UN nations actually abided by the sanctions regime, Saddam may well have either capitulated or grown weak enough internally for the Iraqis to take him out themselves.