Some wits have suggested that meetings of Nato intelligence chiefs will become rather muted affairs, perhaps limited only to exchanges of pleasantries about the weather, because of the presence of Hungary’s new intelligence chief, Sandor Laborc.
Laborc, you see, was trained by the KGB. The International Herald Tribune, recounting Laborc’s communist past, said that already there was some nervousness within Nato intelligence circles, with one anonymous source quoted as saying something along the lines of things being bad enough because “everything we tell the Bulgarians goes straight to Moscow”.
All of this raises again the question of quite what, in the 21st century, qualifies as an impediment in public life.
We know that in Bulgaria, the emergence of a communist-era secret service document with a codename attached to your name does not. The current head of state had one and, so says the commission excavating the remaining files, so did several other people still in public office and in public life – with a number of prominent media people on the list, too. But having been Agent Suchabody does not really count. In the live television debate before Bulgaria’s 2001 president elections, then incumbent Petar Stoyanov flourished a dossier that he said exposed challenger Georgi Purvanov as a communist collaborator. This morning, Purvanov woke up to the latest day of his second term in office. Stoyanov has faded away from his most recent venture into public life, a failed attempt to revive the right-wing opposition.
Recent years have seen Joschka Fischer serve for seven years up to 2005 as Germany’s vice-chancellor and as its foreign minister notwithstanding his youthful involvement with the anarchist movement, including, no less, having been photographed walloping over the head a policeman ironically named Marx. His fellow former anarchist, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, known in his youth as Danny the Red, turned Green with the years and sits in the European Parliament. Such backgrounds, which may be written off as the peccadilloes of youth superheated by the Sixties, are a lot wilder than other matters dragged up from the pasts of other politicos, such as the officially unproven allegation that Jacques Chirac, when mayor of Paris, was lavish with the public purse in purchasing vintage wines. Nor can it escape notice that a number of European politicians have backgrounds redder than Dimitry Medvedev, even though he was installed through Russia’s elections as president by his predecessor, agent Putin, formerly of the KGB. But Russia does not quite qualify at the moment as a country that chooses its presidents through elections, so it hardly matters what anyone’s past holds.
All of these tales emanate from Europe; it is hard to imagine any presidential wannabe in the United States having survived them. The Republicans’ John McCain was alleged by the New York Times to have had an inappropriately close relationship with a woman lobbyist. This seems, for the moment, to have died away as a smear; perhaps even it added to his macho credentials, whatever his denials. The best anyone can do at the moment is for some to carp that, as someone born in the Panama Canal zone, albeit to US parents, McCain is disqualified as a “natural born US citizen”, as the US constitution requires its presidents to be.
Hillary Clinton, by the time the sun rose over Texas on March 5 and the ballots were counted, no doubt was little distracted by any negatives by association because of her husband’s presidency, or even whether or not she ever had inhaled (marijuana, to clarify). Various attempted smears against her husband in his campaign, from allegations of sexual misconduct to his having dodged the draft, did not bar him from two terms as president. As to the baffling two terms of George W Bush, intimations of previous substance abuse and allegations of absenteeism from military service did not stop him.
It is not, after all, as if any recent high-flying (perhaps not the best term for Bush considering he flew all too little for the Texas Air Guard) politician had to face a smear of the kind directed against Barack Hussein Obama, that he secretly is/was (horrors!) a Muslim. Using this claim about his faith, a claim that he denies, is a sad indication of how low politics can sink. Today I read other darts against him, the terrifying allegations that he can sometimes display bad temper and used to be seen smoking (cigarettes, to clarify) in public.
Back in Bulgaria, one Nikolai Kamov, expelled from the Bulgarian Socialist Party-dominated Coalition for Bulgaria for voting against the Cabinet in the vote of no confidence, cried: “Why is there no MP expelled for corruption?” Been in politics long, Gospodin Kamov?
If anyone wants me, I’ll be in the archives.
