Mulroney was the real story
By Stevie Cameron, Globe & Mail, Nov 22, 2003

Recently, The Globe and Mail ran a sensational three-day story about a secret hearing, a journalist who allegedly turned secret police informant and a payment to a former prime minister. In the high-profile Saturday edition, with a three-column, front page picture with 100-point type, I was the person portrayed as the secret informant.

But they buried the lead.

In fact, the most important element in the three stories The Globe ran wasn't about me. It was the revelation made the following Monday that shortly after stepping down as prime minister in 1993, Brian Mulroney accepted $300,000 over 18 months from Karlheinz Schreiber, an infamous German-Canadian arms dealer. In cash. To help promote a fresh pasta business and develop international contacts, said a spokesman for Mr. Mulroney.

Now that was the real shocker. Mr. Schreiber is the self-proclaimed master of the art of dispensing schmiergelder or "grease-money" to win contracts for German companies.

Although Germany has been trying to extradite him from Canada since August, 1999, on fraud charges involving three government contracts in Canada and one in Saudi Arabia, it was Mr. Schreiber's 1991 secret political contribution of one million Deutsche marks (DM) to Germany's Christian Democrats that brought him international infamy. Delivered in a suitcase to the party's treasurer, and as usual in cash, the undeclared donation brought down Helmut Kohl, the former chancellor of Germany, in the worst political crisis in that country since the war. Known as the Spendenaffare or slush-fund scandal, it spawned two parliamentary inquiries.

Investigations showed it was Mr. Schreiber who organized the payment of secret commissions on a DM 446-million deal to sell Thyssen tanks to the Saudis in the 1991 gulf war. Half the money went for secret commissions to pay bribes and kickbacks.

None of this money was his own; it was provided by German munitions companies. Mr. Schreiber's job was to spread it where needed and by his own admission, his main beneficiaries were politicians. He took a percentage as his fee.

He also received about $20-million (Cdn.) from Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France, to spread around on the Air Canada purchase of Airbus planes in the late 1980s and about $6-million to kick-start a Thyssen tank plant in Nova Scotia that was never built. In one of his piddliest deals in the mid-1980s, he received secret commissions of about $1.2-million to spread around for the sale of MBB helicopters to the Canadian Coast Guard. That company is now known as Eurocopter Canada Ltd.

After a lengthy police investigation, as we know now, a secret preliminary hearing into the Eurocopter case began in a Toronto court three years ago. This is the hearing The Globe and Mail breathlessly reported on in the first instalment of its series.I tried to find and get into the hearing and failed, and had no lawyer there. That has proved unfortunate for me as no one was there to protest against the volumes of diatribe delivered against me by Mr. Schreiber's lawyer, Eddie Greenspan, a series of allegations reprinted by The Globe in the second part of the series, under the byline of William Kaplan. (Ironically, a couple of years ago, when I was a regular Globe contributor, I tried to interest editors in the whole Eurocopter story. At that time, the story of the aging Sea King helicopters was big news and the Chrétien government was backing Eurocopter's bid to replace them. But The Globe wasn't interested then.)

A Toronto lawyer who helped Mr. Mulroney tell his side of the Airbus affair in a 1998 book, Presumed Guilty, Mr. Kaplan blamed me for creating many of Mr. Mulroney's problems. He stated that I had betrayed the RCMP officer who was the lead investigator, Staff Sergeant Fraser Fiegenwald. In a glowing, 2,500-word review of Mr. Kaplan's book, which he published in his then-Financial Post and in most of his Southam newspapers, Conrad Black pounced on me, saying I had "ratted" on a police source. When Staff Sergeant Fiegenwald wrote a public letter to say the allegation was nonsense and that he admired my work, none of the Black papers would print it. Only The Globe and Mail, to its credit, published a story about the Fiegenwald rebuttal.

Mr. Kaplan's 1998 book had one interesting section that is relevant here. It described, from Mr. Mulroney's lips, the spin campaign his team designed to limit the damage threatened by the looming RCMP Airbus investigation that would name the former prime minister as a target. Mr. Mulroney's team would leak the story to a friendly reporter. The strategy was masterful; they controlled the story for weeks and the Mounties were left on the defensive.

This time, Mr. Kaplan revealed that the former prime minister did indeed receive a cash payment of $300,000 from Mr. Schreiber. This was the significant revelation, though it only appeared in the last part of Mr. Kaplan's 16,000-word, three-piece story.

In its astonishing treatment of me, The Globe ignored the fact that I had originally broken the story of Mr. Schreiber's influence in Ottawa years ago, for The Globe; that I had been edited and guided by their best people, and that I had never been sued for anything in the books I have published on this whole matter. The paper's treatment is incredible to me.

Journalists across the country have been in touch and given me strength and comfort. They know how difficult investigative work is. They know that our job is to dig to get the truth. It was my privilege to work for a Globe where reporters usually go through a rigorous editing process to make sure standards of fairness and accuracy are met. Now the paper suggests I may be a confidential informant.

So let's look at that. Mr. Kaplan isn't just saying I betrayed a Mountie any longer; now, he uncritically repeats Eddie Greenspan's accusations that I betrayed journalistic standards by becoming a confidential police informant. He even quotes from a 2001 fax Mr. Greenspan sent to me on behalf of his client in which the lawyer demands I answer how much I was paid to be an informant and whether or not I had a contract with the RCMP. (I never replied.) This was nonsense and deliberately insulting. Yes, I try to get help from police on stories. That's my job. That's what we do. Police reporters, investigative reporters, political reporters all share and swap information all the time with cops, business people, politicians. But in this case, I never approached the RCMP.

Instead, I was called in 1995 by officers who told me they had not started a formal investigation but were simply nosing around to see whether or not an investigation into the sale of Airbus planes to Air Canada was warranted. Could they come and see me? I was intrigued. Sure, I said, thinking I might get a good story out of this. I have never hidden the fact that they interviewed me, nor have the half-dozen or so other reporters they went to see. I answered their questions truthfully. Was I the one who approached the police? No. Did I give any information? Yes -- information that was on the public record. It was in my own stories and in the 1994 book I had just published, On the Take; it was also in other media outlets in Canada and Germany. I did not give them any names of my sources or any information that was confidential. Paid police informant? Never. A confidential informant? Are you kidding me? Did they promise to protect me? There was no promise; indeed, police assured me that my interview would come out at trial. I never asked to be a confidential informant and if I had been in court the day Eddie Greenspan started throwing my name around, I would have said, "Who, me?" Did Mr. Kaplan interview me before writing his attack against me? Of course not. The only chance I had to respond to these charges came the day before all those pages went to press. I denied them vehemently.

In 1999, CBC Producer Harvey Cashore and I began work on The Last Amigo, our book about Mr. Schreiber. Our research extended to Costa Rica, Gibraltar, Saudi Arabia, the United States and Europe, as we followed Mr. Schreiber's money trail through his personal diaries, banking records, witness statements to police and testimony before a parliamentary inquiry in Berlin. By 2001, we finally understood the whole story. Perhaps now, The Globe is beginning to learn the truth about this story, too.

Mr. Mulroney's admission that, after leaving office as prime minister in 1993, he received $300,000 in cash from Mr. Schreiber was the real story in their recent series. I was the sideshow.

Stevie Cameron is the author of On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years, and co-author, with Harvey Cashore, of The Last Amigo: Karlheinz Schreiber and the Anatomy of a Scandal.

Mulroney made money from Bre-X scandal (Canada's crooked politicians & bureaucrats). PunchBuggy.Com

On The Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years (a book review)

Back in the limelight (Brian Mulroney's crusade to burnish his image and rescue his reputation) by Peter C. Newman, National Post, May 11, 2002
In addition to meetings with Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and China's top bureaucrats, Brian Mulroney has served as an advisor to Canadian tycoon Peter Munk... The debate over Brian Mulroney's performance during his stormy decade in power rages on, but there is little doubt about his enhanced international stature since he left office in 1993. He has emerged as a major player in the shadowy world of international geopolitics, constantly consulted by the rich and powerful, who hand him lucrative assignments and endow him with greater global clout than he had as prime minister of Canada... He nurtured and expanded his relationships among America's corporate elite while he was in office, and that led eventually to his extraordinary friendships with the two George Bushes... When he voluntarily left the leadership of Canada's progressive Conservative Party in the spring of 1993, Peter Munk, the voluble chairman and chief shareholder of the giant Barrick gold mining and TrizecHaun real estate empires, rallied to the cause by naming Mr Mulroney to both boards... On top of his director's fees, he earns an annual stipend of $250,000 from each company, plus generous stock options. When I asked Mr Munk why he appointed the former prime minister, he stated the obvious: "Because Brian has great contacts. He knows every dictator in the world on a first-name basis." Brian Mulroney's first high-profile corporate assignment in the USA was an invitation to join the board of Archer, Daniels Midland Company, a giant food additive producer based in Decatur, Illinois, which shortly afterwards got itself into deep doo-doo...

Reader James wonders what deal Canada's ex-PM Mulroney struck with ADM, one of world's largest dealers in grain

MULRONEY CASH FLOW WOE

MULRONEY BALONEY FISHY (reader Keith says Canada's ex-PM Mulroney just received a reward from a questionable pharmaceutical organization)

Ex-PM admits arms dealer deal ($300,000 cash in 3 envelopes) & How poor really was Mulroney? (bought $1.7 million mansion). AFP/TOStar, Dec 1, 2007. Go to PIGS AT THE TROUGH

Reader Angus asks for news about gun- and cocaine-smuggling Canadian prime ministers (and the Bre-X scandal)

Drugs found on Prime Minister's ship (millions of dollars of cocaine attached to grate on bottom of boat named after wife). Canada Press, Jul 2, 2004. Go to 35.The Brotherhood & 10.Rulers & CANADA'S PM SHIPS COCAINE & DRUG WAR & PEACE

RISE OF GODFATHERS (get political godsons elected & receive contracts in return). BBC, Nov 10, 2003. Go to 35.The Brotherhood & 5.New World Order & RFK'S ENEMY WITHIN

AMERICA'S MORONS and CANADA'S RED TRUDEAU

MAFIA MOGULS and CORPORATE COMMUNISM

Go to 10.The Rulers and 8.Classes of People and 5.Pyramidal New World Order and 35.The Brotherhood