American Chief of Estonian Army Quits

The army chief of the Baltic state of Estonia, a former U.S. Army colonel who served in the Vietnam and Korean wars, resigned Sunday after a bitter dispute with his own defense minister.

Estonian President Lennart Meri said he had asked for the resignation of Aleksander Einseln. Meri said in a statement that it was inappropriate for the army chief to conduct the dispute with Defense Minister Andrus Oovel in public.

Meri was the leading force in recruiting Einseln, 64, to modernize the country’s small defense force after Estonia regained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991.

Einseln fled his native Estonia with his mother at the age of 12 as Russian troops prepared to storm the German-occupied Estonian capital in 1944.

He was invited back by Meri and fought the U.S. Congress--which wanted to strip him of his U.S. citizenship--to do so.

But his reputation as a tough fighter of corruption was undermined by several scandals.

He and Oovel have been trading insults since Oovel rebuked him for not controlling his staff after the head of the General Staff’s finance department was accused of illegal arms sales.