Paul R. Hollrah, O.E.

Hostage Rescue...Clinton Style
August 12, 2009

American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, reporters for Al Gore’s Current TV organization, are now back on American soil. The two were captured by North Korean security forces in March of this year under circumstances that remain in dispute. They were charged with espionage, tried, and sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp.

Were the women captured on North Korean soil or on Chinese soil? And why were they there? Perhaps these mysteries will now be solved. But what we may never know is the price that the Obama Administration paid for their release.

In a New York Times report, headlined "In Release of Journalists Both Clintons Had Key Roles," the Times said, "Former President Bill Clinton left North Korea on Wednesday morning after a dramatic 20-hour visit, in which he won the freedom of two American journalists, opened a diplomatic channel to North Korea’s reclusive government, and dined with the North’s ailing leader, Kim Jong-Il.”

While the White House has attempted to promote the fiction that Clinton traveled to Pyongyang as a private citizen, probably to avoid questions on what price Obama had to pay to win the women’s release, it is clear that Clinton went to North Korea as an official representative of the Obama Administration. Was a deal made? Was there a quid pro quo? We are, after all, dealing with an administration that would call out teams of union goons to rough up senior citizens as they attempt to express their fears that Obama’s healthcare "reform” proposal would ultimately ration healthcare for Medicare recipients.

The recent history of Democrat involvement in international hostage rescue attempts is not a pretty one...especially where the Clintons are concerned.

For example, during the mid-90s my partner and I represented the United Methodist Church in all the states of the former Soviet Union. And inasmuch as the Methodists felt it was important to first save a man’s life before they could save his soul, most of our work involved the delivery of humanitarian aid to the needy people across the nation.

On October 7, 1993 we received a call from Methodist Church headquarters in New York, advising us that they had a new assignment for us. One of their members, Kenneth Beaty, of Mustang, Oklahoma, was working in Kuwait, helping to extinguish the oil field fires left behind by Saddam Hussein’s invasion forces as they retreated back across the border at the end of the first Gulf War.

Beaty had inadvertently wandered across the Kuwait-Iraq frontier and was taken into custody by Saddam’s Republican Guards. He was taken to Baghdad, tried on charges of espionage, and sentenced to a long prison term. Our assignment was to win his release.

Our initial reaction was to declare what we would NOT do. We would not attempt a rescue by hiring teams of mercenaries in black jump suits to fly into Baghdad in black helicopters. That method had been employed successfully by H. Ross Perot in 1979 when he rescued two of his EDS employees being held in Iran. It was tried a second time in April 1980 when Jimmy Carter sent in an armed force to rescue the fifty-three diplomats being held in the U.S. Embassy by a group of radical Iranian students.

That effort was a miserable failure. Three helicopters and a C-130 cargo plane were lost and eight American servicemen died in the Iranian desert. No one had to tell us that, if a rescue attempt failed in Iran in 1980, with the entire U.S. military establishment to draw upon, the odds were not good that we could make it work in 1993. We would only succeed in getting a lot of people killed.

The only reasonable alternative was to offer Saddam a ransom...U.S. national policy on the payment of ransom, notwithstanding.

It had been U.S. policy for many years not to pay ransom to recover Americans being held in foreign lands. That policy was much in evidence during the Reagan years when seven Americans were being held by Islamic extremists in Lebanon. One of those hostages, Lt. Col. William F. Buckley was the CIA Station Chief at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut when he was taken captive in March 1984.

A year later, when word reached Ronald Reagan that Colonel Buckley was being tortured to death, he gave the order to get our hostages back. According to National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s exact words were, "I want you to do whatever you have to do to help these people keep body and soul together.”

What followed was a complex plan in which American-made anti-tank missiles were sold to the Iranians, at hugely inflated prices, with the Israeli government acting as middle men to avoid violating the long-standing policy against ransom payments. Israeli profits from the transaction were then used to support the Contra forces fighting a guerilla war against the Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, circumventing the Democrats’ Boland Amendment which prohibited the expenditure of funds to assist the pro-American Contras.

Unfortunately, the so-called "arms-for-hostages” deal came too late to save Lt. Col. Buckley. He was murdered by his Islamic captors and his remains were not returned to the United States until 1987.

Democrats in Congress held public hearings on the Iran-Contra affair and several members of the Reagan White House staff, including National Security Advisor Robert "Bud” McFarlane; his deputy, Admiral John M. Poindexter; and Lt. Col. Oliver North were sentenced to prison terms on charges of perjury and contempt of congress.

Convictions of all three were subsequently overturned on appeal. However, congressional Democrats were so enraged that the Reagan Administration had found a way around the Boland Amendment, making it possible to support the anti-Communist forces in Nicaragua, that there was even talk of impeaching Ronald Reagan.

Needless to say, after the fuss created by liberals and Democrats over Reagan’s handling of the Iran-Contra affair...where, technically, no U.S. laws were violated...the Clinton Administration found it very difficult to publicly put their stamp of approval on our efforts to pay a ransom to Saddam Hussein in 1993.

Nevertheless, in the days that followed, American pharmaceutical manufacturers agreed to contribute some $250,000 worth of pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies to our ransom attempt. It was just what the Iraqis needed. Due to an effective international embargo, the Iraqis were seriously short of food and medical supplies, and Saddam quickly accepted our offer.

However, while officials of the Clinton State Department were involved in every aspect of the effort to recover Ken Beaty, Democrats could not be seen as having their "fingerprints” on a deal to ransom an American prisoner from an Iraqi prison...especially after the fuss they’d made over Iran-Contra. They had to have a plausible cover story.

Accordingly, on November 13, 1993, then-Senator David Boren (D-OK), now president of the University of Oklahoma, announced in a high profile Washington press conference that he would fly to Baghdad to plead with Saddam Hussein for Kenneth Beaty’s release.

Boren arrived in Baghdad on November 14 and returned with Beaty on November 15. The ensuing press conference featured numerous Clinton Administration officials with broad smiles on their faces. It was a great photo op, but it was all a sham. Kenneth Beaty’s freedom was bought and paid for long before Senator Boren flew to Baghdad to "plead” for his release.

So, if the Clintons and Barack Obama were all deeply involved in saving Laura Ling and Eula Lee from the horrors of a North Korean labor camp, we can’t help but wonder what price was paid. Their freedom certainly did not come about because of a sudden attack of conscience on the part of Kim Jon-Il.

What we are now learning is that Bill Clinton went to Pyangyong with word that Obama was willing to accede to Kim Jong-Il’s demand for direct talks with the United States, pulling the rug out from under the Chinese, the South Koreans, and the Japanese. If that is the case, Obama paid a very high price for the release of the two women...a price that the American people and our Asian allies will come to regret.