Plenty of Reasons to Probe Holbrooke’s Use of Contacts

Way back in December 1992, President-elect Clinton and his aides announced new ethical rules designed to prevent former U.S. officials from cashing in on their government connections after they returned to private life.

The rules broadened the prohibitions on lobbying that had been enacted by Congress. Warren Christopher, then head of Clinton’s transition team, said the aim was to satisfy Clinton’s campaign pledge to “stop the revolving door” of Washington influence-peddling.

Now, Richard Holbrooke, the former Bosnia peace negotiator who is Clinton’s nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations, has been accused by the Justice Department of running afoul of these conflict-of-interest restrictions. Holbrooke and his friends have insisted he did nothing wrong. But there are plenty of good reasons the issue should be treated seriously.

In 1996, after leaving the State Department, Holbrooke went to work as an investment banker in New York for Credit Suisse First Boston. Within months he wrote a letter on Credit Suisse stationery to James Laney, the U.S. envoy to South Korea, seeking his help in lining up an audience with then-President Kim Young Sam. Holbrooke also suggested the South Korean foreign minister should be invited to attend a lunch Laney would sponsor for Holbrooke.

The meeting with the president never took place, and the foreign minister didn’t come to Laney’s lunch. Nevertheless, the Justice Department charges that Holbrooke’s efforts may have breached the law that bars former U.S. officials from contacting people in their old departments or agencies for a year after they leave the government.

Trivial, say Holbrooke’s defenders, including Laney. Holbrooke was just letting the ambassador know he was in the country. Holbrooke himself said in an ABC interview that he was acting not for Credit Suisse but “under the hat” of part-time U.S. government envoy to the Balkans and Cyprus.

That seems unlikely. Neither Laney nor the South Korean government plays a role of any consequence in the Balkans or Cyprus. By contrast, Credit Suisse, which paid for Holbrooke’s trip, has major financial stakes in South Korea.

The larger problem is that there is something of a history here.

Over the years, Holbrooke’s image has been that of the foreign-policy operative who, although he may love the limelight and push too hard, can produce results such as the Dayton peace agreement on Bosnia. Out of public view, however, he seems to have made use of his official connections to press equally hard for private interests.

When he was a private businessman, former U.S. ambassador to South Korea James Lilley said this week, “Holbrooke was the most aggressive salesman I’ve ever seen, for whatever he was doing. And he had no compunction about using embassy people in the process.”

The Justice Department started looking into Holbrooke’s activities last year after getting an anonymous tip that he had improperly lobbied U.S. embassy officials in Hungary on behalf of Credit Suisse. They found no evidence of wrongdoing in that case but ran across the Korean episode in the process.

On the surface, it might seem not to matter much whether Holbrooke will be confirmed as U.N. ambassador. The job is not one of the top positions in the Clinton administration. And it’s not a job that necessarily plays to Holbrooke’s strengths; at the U.N. Security Council, quiet, low-keyed diplomacy is the customary operating style. It’s not even clear why Holbrooke would want the position. He would be serving in the last two years of a lame-duck administration.

Yet the underlying stakes are much larger. No one knows who will be the next Democratic secretary of State. If Vice President Al Gore should win the election in 2000, who would run foreign policy for him? Or if Secretary of State Madeleine Albright should step down, who would replace her? There aren’t many obvious candidates.

So Holbrooke’s nomination to the United Nations is a test, both of the revolving-door ethics rules and also of whether he could be confirmed later on if chosen as secretary of State. It’s easy to foresee that, if Holbrooke is approved, his supporters will argue in some future nomination hearing that the conflict-of-interest allegations have been investigated and resolved.

For these reasons, it seems important for the Senate to take a good hard look at whether or how Holbrooke has used his government connections in private life.

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every Wednesday.