Clinton helped fire
Russian defense chief

WASHINGTON — At least one Andrews Air Force Base pilot ranks it as the “strangest” mission he’s flown.

Normally, he and other pilots at the top-security Maryland base shuttle U.S. VIPs — whether it’s the president, the vice president or Cabinet members — around the globe.

But in May 1997, the White House ordered a special airlift mission, or “SAM,” for a foreign official — a rare request. Not just any foreigner, either; this was Russia’s defense minister. Destination: Hawaii, and then on to Japan.

“It was odd that we were flying Russian dignitaries,” said the Andrews pilot, who helped fly the Boeing 707 used in the flight.

But over the Pacific things really got weird.

“We didn’t take him on to Japan,” he said in an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily. “We left him off in Hawaii and turned around and came back home.”

As it happens, the defense minister, Igor Rodionov, was fired in mid-flight by then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin — more than a week before he officially sacked him on Russian national TV. And the Andrews crew was ordered to come home after dropping him off at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu.

Officials back in Washington didn’t explain why the mission, described by the pilot as “pretty abnormal,” had changed.

But flight attendants got wind of what happened from Rodionov and his Russian entourage.

“One of the flight attendants came up [to the cockpit] and said, ‘Hey, you know he was fired, the minister of defense for Russia,'” said the pilot, who requested his name be withheld. “He was fired while we were in the air.”

“And so that became sort of the joke — that we had to kick this guy off in Hawaii because he got fired,” he added.

Rodionov’s staff apparently took the news hard.

They were “really boozing it up,” the pilot said. “At least one of them got sick in the bathroom and just trashed the whole place.”

He added: “I remember one of the flight attendants came up and said, ‘I am not going in there [to the fouled bathroom]. Somebody else can go in there. I’m not going in there.'”

Spencer Geissinger, the State Department’s assistant chief of protocol for visits, says such a special mission could only have been “approved by the president.”

The odd flight took place a year after former President Clinton, in a meeting with Yeltsin, promised to support him in exchange for Yeltsin agreeing to end a Russian ban on U.S. chicken imports, which would benefit Arkansas chicken king and Clinton donor Don Tyson. The deal was captured in a confidential State Department memo obtained by Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz.

Loaning out an official U.S. government plane and pilots to help Yeltsin carry out his rather messy internal affairs would certainly constitute support.

But there may be more to the story.

Clearing an obstacle

It’s not unlikely that Clinton and Yeltsin teamed up to cut Rodionov out of the picture on their Russia-NATO deal, some Russia experts speculate. Rodionov, a hawk, was opposed to it.

After all, he was secretly sacked the same day — May 14, 1997 — that the Russian foreign minister and the NATO secretary general reached agreement in Moscow on linking Russia with the NATO alliance.

Rodionov, in Washington for whirlwind talks on other matters, seemed caught off guard by the news. And the State Department refused to allow reporters to ask him questions at a press conference with State Secretary Madeleine Albright, who’d met with White House officials earlier that morning about the NATO deal.

The White House, which reportedly saw the documents even before U.S.-NATO officials, made great political hay of the plan to give Moscow a formal voice in NATO.
Clinton held a press conference in the Rose Garden to announce the news.

After meeting with National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, Rodionov flew to Hawaii for scheduled briefings with the U.S. Pacific Command.

While there, he gave a restrained assessment of the NATO deal.

It “does not make it possible to eliminate all the problems,” he said. And he said that as long as the alliance remains a military bloc rather than a political union, it will always “cause some misunderstanding and hostility in Russia.”

Rodionov flew on to Tokyo for historic meetings with Japanese defense officials, but this time without the official U.S. escort.

Then on May 22 — five days before Yeltsin and Clinton signed the NATO accord — an angry Yeltsin fired the popular Rodionov on national TV in a clearly staged act, citing a lack of progress on reforming the military and the humiliating defeat at the hands of
Chechen guerrillas. He also ranted about corrupt Russian generals growing “fat” and building “dachas” in the countryside for themselves, while soldiers went hungry.

Left out of his list of complaints was Rodionov’s opposition to the NATO deal.

Later, Russian Gen. Alexander Lebed asserted that Yeltsin really removed Rodionov to clear the way for the Russia-NATO deal.

It wouldn’t be the first time the Clinton administration cozied up to the Yeltsin regime, playing politics with national security.

Vice President Al Gore’s secret dealings with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin’s corruption-tainted partner, included letting Moscow
sell conventional arms and nuclear weapons technology to Iran without U.S. sanctions.