https://www.trevorloudon.com/2019/04/russian-collusion-look-to-joe-biden/
While President Donald Trump has been cleared of charges of Russian collusion, there is a better case of Russian collusion to be made against another U.S. leader—former Vice President Joe Biden. An investigation into Biden’s Russian ties is long overdue and urgent, as he is likely to declare his campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination sometime soon.
While widely regarded as the moderate face of the Democratic Party, that perception might change quickly if more people were aware of his past work to further the interests of the former Soviet Union and Russia.
Biden visited the Soviet Union several times during his early Senate career and was well known to Soviet leaders. The appalling Soviet treatment of dissidents was a big issue at the time, and then-Sen. Biden would sometimes express concern at their plight.
Vadim Zagladin was deputy chief of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee’s International Department until 1987 and then served as adviser to the last leader of the Soviet Union—Mikhail Gorbachev—until 1991. Zagladin was reportedly both an envoy and a spy, responsible for gathering secrets and spreading propaganda and disinformation to advance Soviet interests.
City Journal writer Claire Berlinski told of a circa 1979 report, recovered from Soviet archives, written by Zagladin on his observations of Sen. Biden and his leftist Indiana Republican colleague and former President Barack Obama’s “favorite Republican,” Richard Lugar:
”Unofficially, Biden and Lugar said that, at the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for ‘human rights.’ … In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.”
Biden was not just soft on the Soviets; he actively worked in lock step with their military and foreign policy objectives.
Throughout the 1980s, Biden consistently opposed President Ronald Reagan’s tough line against the Soviet Union. Biden instead favored détente—which, had that policy remained in place, would have meant more subsidies and trade deals, keeping the Soviet Union alive much longer than necessary. Biden also strongly opposed Reagan’s effort to fund the Contras, an anti-communist rebel group fighting against Nicaragua’s pro-Soviet Sandinista regime.
Biden was also a strong opponent of U.S. military opposition to Soviet expansionism.
In 2008, Pete Wehner wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
“Throughout his career, Mr. Biden has consistently opposed modernization of our strategic nuclear forces. He was a fierce opponent of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Mr. Biden voted against funding SDI, saying … ‘The president’s continued adherence to [SDI] constitutes one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.’ Mr. Biden has remained a consistent critic of missile defense and even opposed the U.S. dropping out of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty after the collapse of the Soviet Union (which was the co-signatory to the ABM Treaty) and the end of the Cold War.”
Council for a Livable World
To understand why Biden was so consistently on the wrong side of history, it’s important to understand his connections to the little-known but highly influential Council for a Livable World (CLW).
Founded in 1962 by former Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard, CLW is a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy organization that claims to be “dedicated to reducing the danger of nuclear weapons and increasing national security.”
In truth, CLW has worked consistently to disarm the United States to the benefit of Moscow throughout its entire history.
Szilard was an active supporter of Bela Kun’s short-lived communist government in post-World War I Hungary. After moving to the United States, Szilard became one of many communist sympathizers and agents working inside the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort to build an American atomic weapon.
In 1942, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, head of the newly formed Manhattan Project, was so concerned about Szilard’s ideology that he declared Szilard was “detrimental to the project and that he should be arrested and interned for the duration of the Second World War.”
Szilard survived Groves’ displeasure, and after helping produce the bombs that ended World War II, the communist sympathizer became a prominent anti-nuclear campaigner leading to a two-hour meeting with then-Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev in 1960.
Pavel Sudaplatov, former wartime director of the Administration for Special Tasks, an elite unit of the Soviet intelligence service, claimed in his 1994 book, “Special Tasks, Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster,” that Szilard, along with fellow scientists Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, knowingly supplied information to Soviet contacts during their work on the Manhattan Project. This information was subsequently used to help build the first Soviet atomic weapon.
Sudaplatov went on to explain that Szilard’s usefulness to the Soviet cause wasn’t confined to spying:
“After our reactor was put into operation in 1946, [Soviet spy chief Lavrentiy] Beria issued orders to stop all contacts with our American sources in the Manhattan Project; the FBI was getting close to uncovering some of our agents. Beria said we should think how to use Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, and others around them in the peace campaign against nuclear armament.
“Disarmament and the inability to impose nuclear blackmail would deprive the United States of its advantage. We began a worldwide political campaign against nuclear superiority, which kept up until we exploded our own nuclear bomb, in 1949. Our goal was to preempt American power politically before the Soviet Union had its own bomb. Beria warned us not to compromise Western scientists, but to use their political influence.”
After the 1961 Cuban missile crisis resulted in a Soviet backdown and a withdrawal of their missiles from Cuba, Szilard set about becoming a Washington “insider” to work politically for U.S. disarmament.
According to the pro-disarmament Pugwash Institute:
“In 1962, he [Szilard] founded the Council for a Livable World to raise money for U.S. Senators who favored arms-control treaties. By Szilard’s calculus, all states had two Senators, so votes came cheapest by supporting campaigns in the least populous states. The Council’s first successful candidate was Sen. George McGovern from South Dakota. Today the Council thrives by supporting candidates from all states and the House of Representatives as well. It is America’s first political action committee for arms control and disarmament.”
According to the CLW website: “Almost 50 years ago, Council for a Livable World pioneered a system for helping progressive congressional candidates get elected to office. Over the last 44 years, we have helped elect 113 U.S. arms control candidates to the Senate and 151 candidates to the House of Representatives.”
The CLW’s main way of promoting “peace” has been to promote U.S. disarmament concessions to the Soviet Union/Russia and “non-intervention” against Moscow-backed aggression.
Young “progressive” Joe Biden from the tiny state of Delaware was a perfect candidate for CLW recruitment.
According to The Tennessean:
“When Joe Biden started running for a Senate seat in 1972, few people thought the young man from Delaware had a chance.
“But a well-placed Tennessee couple tagged him early as an up-and-comer.
“’I was 29 years old, running for the United States Senate against a guy with an 81 percent favorable rating, a year where Richard Nixon won my state by over 65 percent of the vote, and I was an Irish Catholic in a state that (had) never elected one,’ Biden told Tennessee Democrats in a [2010] speech.
“Biden pulled off a stunning, 3,162-vote upset with a mix of youthful vigor, skillful campaigning, energized volunteers and smart advertising—fueled by tens of thousands of dollars that a prominent Tennessee couple raised for his campaign. …
“His candidacy caught the eye of former Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore, Sr., who was working with a Washington, D.C.-based arms control group called the Council for a Livable World.”
Albert Gore Sr.
Albert Gore Sr. raised $89,000, nearly one-third of the $287,000 Biden raised in total.
To reiterate, Gore Sr., the father of “the creator of the Internet” and promoter of global warming, financed Biden.
The Tennessean article continued:
“Ted Kaufman, who volunteered for Biden’s campaign, said the Gores’ support was critical. …
“Albert Gore, Sr., who had lost a re-election bid in 1970, sent out a letter to the Council for a Livable World’s supporters, urging them to ‘take a hard look at the Delaware race,’ Kaufman recalled.
“‘It gave [Biden] credibility in Washington,’ he said. ‘It also attracted people to come and help on the race.’”
Gore Sr. himself was supported by CLW and would go on to become its chairman.
“On June 21, 1971, The Nashville Banner reported that Gore, six months removed from the Senate, would become the Washington chairman of the Council for a Livable World, which advocates for decreasing the threat of nuclear weapons. Founded in 1962, the council also works to help like-minded candidates win Senate and House seats.
“Gore ‘expects to spend much time in the next 18 months traveling across the country in behalf of 1972 Senate candidates for which the council is raising campaign money,’ the Banner reported in a short story.
“Nashville civil rights attorney George Barrett, who practiced law with both Albert and Pauline Gore in the early 1970s, said the couple saw in Biden ‘a progressive, bright, hard-working young man.’”
The CLW Strategy
The CLW’s highly effective tactic is to explicitly seek long-shot candidates to fund so it can lean on them later to help with its goal of disarming the United States.
John Isaacs, a senior fellow of the CLW, spelled this strategy out in his 2013 eulogy to his predecessor, Massachusetts-based socialist Jerome Grossman:
“Now, as an aside, we have a dictum at Council for a Livable World. If we support a candidate in his or her first major political contest, he or she will always remember who was with them at the beginning. That has been true with such political figures—(he says modestly)—as President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden. …
“They remember who was with them when they launched their political careers. And that’s why it was so nice to see a tweet from Vice President Biden after Jerry’s death: ‘He was a good friend who worked tirelessly to advance U.S. security through nuclear arms control.’”
Biden was certainly obligated: “Here’s the deal: I was desperately trying to raise money. … I got a call from a woman named Pauline Gore. Would I come down to Washington and meet with [her] and Senator Gore and some … concerned scientists who wanted to talk about the spread of nuclear weapons? It was an outfit called the Council for a Livable World,” Biden said in a 2010 speech in Nashville, according to The Tennessean.
“So I showed up in Sen. Gore’s apartment in the Methodist House, which was catercorner from the Supreme Court. … I sat there, and it basically was an interview. I didn’t realize it. Sen. Gore, who had left the Senate two years earlier, said, ‘I’m going to help you.’”
Isaacs said finding and getting behind Biden “was one of our great coups,” according to The Tennessean. Biden has always remembered the group’s support, Isaacs said. “When you support a politician in his first race, especially an unknown local candidate like Joe Biden, they remember it forever.”
During his 2010 speech, Biden called himself “a product of Al Gore Sr.”
Armand Hammer
It’s worth remembering that Gore Sr. was himself the “product” of a very rich man named Armand Hammer—the long-time head of Occidental Petroleum.
According to espionage expert Edward Jay Epstein:
“In 1950, Hammer made Mr. Gore ‘a partner in a cattle-breeding business, from which the Senator made a substantial profit.’ Thereafter, Gore was Hammer’s designated door-opener in official Washington. When Mr. Gore retired, Hammer made him president of Occidental’s coal division, where he ‘earned more than $500,000 a year.’
“Son Al next put the family’s Senate seat at Hammer’s service. At the 1981 inauguration of Ronald Reagan, Junior managed for Hammer to be seated in a section reserved for senators. Hammer lurked in the doorway, hoping to glad-hand the president, but Mr. Reagan brushed by him without a glance, and with reason. Years earlier, Alexandre de Marenches, the head of French intelligence, had warned him that Hammer was a Soviet ‘agent of influence.’”
Hammer is one of the most famous Soviet operatives of all time. The son of a Communist Party USA founder, Hammer made millions trading with the newly founded Soviet Union at a time when international sanctions almost strangled the newborn Soviet state in its infancy. Hammer met regularly with Lenin when he lived in the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1928.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover began creating a massive file, “61-280—Armand Hammer, Internal Security—Russia,” as early as 1919. According to Epstein, Hoover knew that Hammer financed communist agents but did not move against him,saying that “‘it is often more profitable not to arrest a detected courier’ when there is no assurance that the replacement will be detected.”
It was reported that Hoover was preparing to finally move against Hammer in the 1960s but was dissuaded from doing do by Al Gore Sr.
In sum, likely Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden owes his career in politics to the CLW, an organization created by alleged Soviet agent Leo Szilard, supported by money from Al Gore Sr., who in turn was funded by the Soviet Union’s best friend in the United States, Armand Hammer.
The U.S. military would surely suffocate under President Biden’s watch.
The CLW is deeply involved at the highest levels of U.S. foreign and defense military policymaking, almost always to the detriment of the United States and to the benefit of Moscow. CLW claims credit for canceling many vital U.S. weapons projects and negotiating several disadvantageous weapons treaties with the Soviet Union/Russia.
CLW was involved in establishing a U.S. nuclear testing moratorium in 1992, limiting the deployment of the MX missile and B-2 bomber, blocking deployment of National Missile Defense by the Clinton administration, and eliminating funding for the nuclear “Bunker Buster” and “Reliable Replacement Warhead.”
CLW was also involved in ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, Conventional Forces in Europe, and Strategic Arms Reduction (START) treaty, which President Donald Trump recently canceled because of persistent Russian cheating.
All these measures helped Moscow and hurt the United States, and Biden was in the thick of it.
In October 2012, Biden made a two-minute video congratulating the CLW on its 50th anniversary. Biden was very open about the CLW’s influence on both himself and U.S. policymaking:
“My ties to the Council run long and deep, stretching way back to my first campaign for the United States Senate. I’ll never forget the faith you showed and the help you gave to a young man making a long-shot bid for the United States Senate in 1972. Because of you, we won. That help has continued throughout my entire career. Especially when I was chairman of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee and it continues to this very day.
“My appreciation for your work has only grown over that period as we continue to work together on a wide range of projects all aimed at reducing the danger of nuclear weapons. …
“The insight, counsel and the support you provided me and my colleagues on Capitol Hill and the White House have contributed to landmark achievements from ratifying the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and START to establishing a nuclear testing moratorium here at home to the chemical weapons convention. And to this very day your support and guidance during our recent effort to ratify New START.”
After two years, special counsel Robert Mueller failed to find evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Moscow to win the 2016 presidential election. Perhaps Mueller could be hired to investigate Biden’s lifelong collaboration with pro-Moscow forces to hurt the U.S. military.
The U.S. military is only just beginning to recover under Trump from the huge cuts inflicted on it by another CLW protégé, President Barack Obama.
If Biden becomes president, the U.S. military may be gutted to the point that a U.S. war with Russia, China, or more likely both, becomes unwinnable.
Thanks to Obama, Biden, and the CLW, America may already be at that point.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
