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[ Reuters New Media]
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Monday September 29 9:06 PM EDT

Russia Crime Crisis is Threat to West - Report

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuter) - Russia is an increasingly unreliable partner on
international issues because of the power of corrupt officials, crooked
businessmen and organized crime, a U.S. public policy research group said
Monday.

A panel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said
criminalization of its economy would make normal state-to-state relations
with Russia impossible if left unchecked.

Some 200 Russian organized crime groups operated worldwide after thrusting
their "tentacles throughout Russia's economy" and gaining the ability to
manipulate its banking system and financial markets, the CSIS panel said in
a report.

It said the erosion of legitimate government authority in Russia endangered
international efforts in peacekeeping, nuclear non-proliferation and
economic restructuring.

"The most important, and perhaps the most significant and troubling finding
of the task force, is that, at the level of state-to-state interaction, it
will become impossible for the United States and other states to have
traditional satisfactory dealings with an emergent Russian
criminal-syndicalist state," the CSIS panel report said.

It defined such a state as one shot through with bureaucratic corruption,
full-time "professional criminals" and businessmen for whom existing Russian
law was simply an obstacle to be overcome.

"In many respects such a criminal-syndicalist state already exists in Russia
today," said the CSIS panel, citing government, business and academic
leaders. It said corruption that pervades "every level of Russia's
bureaucracy" was the major hurdle to thwarting organized crime there.

William Webster, who headed both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s, was chairman of the steering
committee under which the CSIS report on Russian organized crime was
prepared.

In a preface to the report, Webster and Arnaud de Borchgrave, the CSIS
Global Organized Crime project director, said roughly two-thirds of Russia's
economy was already "under the sway" of crime syndicates involved in
protection rackets.

"The majority of private enterprises and commercial banks are compelled, by
force if necessary, to pay protection in the amount of 10 percent to 30
percent of their profits" to organized crime groups, it said.

The CSIS panel urged President Clinton to describe Russian organized crime
publicly as a threat to U.S. national security, notably because of the
danger of losing control of its nuclear arsenal.

It said the United States should prod partners in the Group of Seven rich
industrial nations to discuss an investment treaty to deny export credits to
Western firms doing business with organized-crime controlled firms in
Russia.
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