Townsend Selects Running Mate

Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Thursday named the former head of the U.S. Naval Academy as her running mate for this fall's gubernatorial election.

Adm. Charles Larson, who was a Republican up until two weeks ago, was tapped to run for the lieutenant governor spot beside Townsend. Larson, a retired high-ranking naval officer, brings a stellar military record and high-powered connections to the table.

He is a close friend of U.S. Sen. John McCain, and a two-time Naval Academy superintendent, credited with leading the academy through a tumultuous time after sexual harassment and cheating scandals marred the venerable institution.

"Admiral Larson is one of our nation's heroes, a Marylander who has helped chart a new course for higher education in our state, an experienced leader and a public servant who shares my vision for the future of this great state," Townsend says in a statement.

Larson, 66, was a registered Republican but changed his voter registration to Democrat June 11, according to the Anne Arundel County Board of Elections.

He currently serves as vice chair of the 17-member University System of Maryland Board of Regents, the governing body for the state's 13 public universities.

Rep. Robert Ehrlich, the Republican Party's candidate for governor, is expected to announce his running mate July 1.

In a statement released by the Maryland Republican Party, Chairman Michael Steele called the selection of Larson "a careless ploy designed to prop up a lightweight candidate." Steele also criticized Townsend's choice of a former Republican, saying it proved the Democrats are scared of Ehrlich's ability to appeal to voters of both parties.

"In a state with this many Democrats, she apparently is in real trouble -- no one else must have wanted to run with her," Steele says.

Gov. Parris Glendening, who appointed Larson to the board of regents, applauded the choice, saying the admiral has an "inspiring record of service to his country."

"Since choosing to become a Marylander, he has demonstrated his commitment to the citizens of the state through his exemplary record of public service," Glendening says in a statement.

An Admiral's Price for Betrayal

October-December 1996 Issue
By Ted Sampley
U.S. Veteran Dispatch

Obscured in a maze of billion dollar conglomerate deals and huge foreign contributions to the Democratic Party is the reason why four-star Admiral Charles Larson lied January 18, 1994, when he reported Hanoi's cooperation on the POW/MIA issue was "excellent across all fronts."
Larson was in Vietnam as senior U.S. military commander of all U.S. Forces in the Pacific and Indian Ocean areas. His U.S. stamp of approval for Hanoi came at a time when powerful business interests were pressuring President Clinton to betray the POW/MIA families and lift a 19 year-old U.S. imposed economic embargo against Vietnam.
During his 1992 drive to unseat President Bush, candidate Clinton, in a desperate attempt to attract the veteran's vote, made a campaign promise to the POW/MIA families. Clinton promised that "if elected," he would "make the resolution of the POW/MIA issue a real priority" and "would not lift the embargo" until Hanoi made a full, good-faith accounting of the missing U.S. servicemen. POW/MIA family members and veterans were stunned by Larson's unequivocal support for Hanoi. They could not understand why a four-star Admiral would his "missing men" and kow-tow to the communists. The families knew that other than a handful of artifacts and human bone fragments, there had been no POW/MIA cooperation on the part of the Vietnamese. They knew Hanoi was refusing to explain what happened to U.S. POWs known to have been alive in communist Vietnamese hands during and after the war, but never released. The National Alliance of POW/MIA Families called Larson's statement "a smoke screen and a sell-out." The National League of POW/MIA Families complained that the families were continuing to be victimized by Hanoi's "calculated" withholding of POW/MIA information. Bill Bell, former Chief of the U.S. Office of POW/MIA Affairs in Hanoi, said "anyone who claims that Vietnam's cooperation is superb or excellent is either a fool or they have a hidden agenda." Larson's glowing assessment of Hanoi was the cover Clinton needed to block criticism when less than two months later, he gave the business lobby what it wanted and welshed on his MIA promise by lifting the embargo. Amazingly, from the time Clinton made the promise in 1992 until 1994 when he broke it, only two Americans had been accounted for by Vietnam.

Communist Party officials pocket MIA funds

To add insult to injury, against that backdrop of political duplicity and manipulation, evidence of misuse of U.S. POW/MIA funds by the Communist Party of Vietnam began to surface. Larson's comptroller in Hawaii had pumped millions of cold hard U.S. tax dollars allocated for the POW/MIA search into Vietnam's Communist Party bank account in Hanoi, much of which, it was discovered, had ended up in the pockets of high ranking communist officials. No one from the Clinton administration protested.

U.S. policy for sale

There is a provable link between Clinton's decision to remove the Vietnam trade embargo and foreign contributions to the Democratic National Committee, the most obvious from an Indonesian couple living in the United States.
Ariel and Soraya Wiriadinata, now in Jakarta, gave $425,000 to the Democratic committee. They obviously did not have the means to make such a donation on their own. The Wiriadinata's lived in a modest house in suburban Virginia, Ariel worked as a landscape architect and his wife as a homemaker. Her father was the late Hashim Ning, a business partner of Mochtar Riady, the head of an Indonesian corporation called the Lippo Group.
Lippo is an "empire" with billions in assets. It is a family controlled conglomerate of "overseas Chinese" built on banking, real estate, securities, insurance, the financing of infrastructure projects and oil exploration. The group was started in the 1960s in Jakarta by Mochtar Riady. His parents had immigrated from China's Fujian Province to Indonesia. Lippo aggressively pursues business in the Pacific Rim and the United States. It has a partnership with the Charlotte, North Carolina based First Union Corp., one of the biggest banks in the United States.

The Clinton re-election connection

Clinton has a long history with Riady and his son James, a key Lippo official, because of a bank the Riady's owned in Little Rock, Arkansas, that turned out to be of great help to Clinton. In 1984, Riady and Jackson Stephens, chairman of the board of Stephens Group and Stephens Inc., the largest oil and gas exploration, production organization and banking and investment organization in the state of Arkansas, bought Worthen Bank in Little Rock. James Riady was installed there as a Worthen director.
A. Vernon Weaver was the assistant to the chairman of the board of Stephens Group and Stephens Inc. Weaver established close ties with both Clinton and former Arkansas Governor, Jim Guy Tucker, in the 1970s and 80's when he was administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA). While at the SBA, Weaver initiated the Certified Bank Program, which transferred administration of government-guaranteed small business loans from the SBA to certified private banks. Defaulted loans such as the Whitewater real estate development scheme and more grandiose projects in the Little Rock area have already led to several felony convictions in Little Rock, including that of former governor Tucker.

In business with the Red Chinese

In 1984, the Riadys used the Worthen Bank as a vehicle to purchase the Hong Kong Chinese Bank. John Huang worked there in 1984. He was later assigned head of Lippo's U.S. affiliate in Los Angeles, California. After Clinton's election, Huang went to work for the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, in a "top secret" U.S. trade post.
Huang, now the Democratic National Committee's fund-raising vice chairman, is being questioned in a civil suit for allegedly using U.S. government-sponsored trade missions under Brown to raise funds for the Democrats. He is suspected of using the Wiriadinata's to funnel money from the Riady's to help Clinton's 1996 presidential campaign. The Riady's Worthen Bank had made a timely loan to Clinton's cash-strapped presidential campaign in 1992. In November of 1992, China Resources Holding Company (Hua Ren Jituan), owned by the Chinese Communist Party, bought control of Hong Kong Chinese Bank, putting the Riady's in business with the Red Chinese.
U.S. intelligence officers report Hong Kong's China Resources Holding Company traditionally holds at least one vice-president position for a communist "intelligence officer." As a result of meetings Clinton had with the Riady's in Jakarta in 1994 and other promotional trips made by Ron Brown and Huang, Lippo signed more than a billion dollars with deals in China, Indonesia, Vietnam and the United States.

Ron Brown accepts a bribe?

On July 5, 1993, a Washington, D.C. newspaper first published details of an alleged $700,000 bribe from the government of Vietnam to Brown. The alleged bribe was in exchange for the Clinton administration to drop U.S. opposition to Vietnam receiving International Monetary Fund loans and to lift the trade embargo. Although Brown admitted having met three times with Vietnamese agent Nguyen Van Hao after initially lying about the meetings to the press, he denied ever doing business with Hao. The investigation of Secretary Brown was terminated when he died April 4, 1996 in an air crash while on a business trip to Bosnia during the International Force (IFOR) operation. What does all this has to do with the former Pacific Commander, Adm. Larson?

The Admiral wants to be Superintendent

At the time Larson executed his dishonorable task for Clinton, fraudulently "glorifying" Vietnam's POW/MIA cooperation, he was on the way out as the Commander of U.S. Forces in the Pacific and looking for a new post that would accommodate his four-star Flag Officer rank. There was no such assignment and the only alternative would have been retirement and a substantial reduction in salary. Larson had some bargaining power and he was not without significant connections in Washington. He had let it be known that he wanted an unprecedented second tour-of-duty as Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., but it was only a two-star billet and a three year assignment. He had served there as the 51st Superintendent, from August 1983 to August 1986, prior to being promoted to Vice Admiral.
Larson had also gone out of his way to court Sen. Charles Robb (D-VA) who serves as a point man for the Virginia based Mobil Oil Corp., a company keenly interested in drilling in the Pacific Basin, especially the area of the Spratley Islands near the shore of Vietnam. Robb has made numerous trips to Indonesia aboard Mobil Corp. jets. Larson was also stroking Sen. John Kerry (D, MA), the former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, who was also eyeing the enormous potential in Vietnam's budding real estate market and infrastructure development.

How to kill an MIA on paper

Almost immediately upon assuming his responsibility as head of the Select Committee, Kerry began a personal campaign to remove the POW/MIA question as an obstacle preventing billions of dollars in trade between the U.S. and Vietnam. Kerry manipulated, distorted and suppressed evidence allowing MIAs to be written off as dead when evidence indicated that many were alive and possibly incarcerated in communist prisons. He and his staff director, Ms. Frances Zwenig, secretly scripted the testimony of important Department of Defense witnesses who were appearing before the Select Committee and were supposed to be the subject of Kerry's investigative efforts. Zwenig, in an unprecedented action, met with Vietnamese officials in Vietnam and coached them on how to write off as dead on paper, without any physical evidence, American MIAs. After Kerry told USA Today, Nov. 24, 1992, that Vietnam should be "rewarded" for "extraordinary cooperation" in resolving MIA cases, news wire services reported Vietnam had "awarded" the "first real estate license" to Kerry's cousin, Stuart Forbes, chief executive officer of the Boston based Colliers International.
Zwenig, in the meantime, was working as principle author of the Select Committee Final Report while simultaneously working on Ron Brown's transition team at the Department of Commerce. The Select Committee had concluded that U.S prisoners of war were left behind alive in the hands of the communists when the United States pulled out of the Vietnam War in 1973. That finding was a blockbuster. Its release should have driven America into indignation. The U.S. government should have demanded the Vietnamese immediately release all the U.S. prisoners or provide an explanation of what happened to them. Amazingly, there was no outcry from an outraged America. Instead, the whole issue of America's missing servicemen cascaded into a humiliating loss for the POW/MIA families. From day one, the Select Committee had been salted with "loyal friends of Hanoi," linked by greed to the powerful corporate lobby. Hanoi's friends, who dominated the Select Committee, took great pains to carefully fashion its final report in a manner that obscured the one simple truth the Select Committee had uncovered.
Instead of declaring forthrightly that communist Vietnam continued to hold in captivity an unspecified number of live American POWs after the reported release of all U.S. prisoners during Operation Homecoming in 1973, Zwenig edited the Senate Select Committee Final Report to read there is "no conclusive evidence" proving United States prisoners of war still remain alive in Vietnam. Zwenig had opened the door for normalized trade relations with Vietnam and a new career for herself. Zwenig now has a six-figure position as Vice President on the U.S./Vietnam Trade Council, a front organization established in the U.S., which works closely with Vietnam's Communist Party State Committee for Investment. The Trade Council is funded by conglomerates such as Lippo, which lobbies furiously against any U.S. laws perceived as hindering investment in Vietnam's cheap oil and slave labor market.

Follow the smell of money through the maze

When Weaver served as assistant to the chairman of the board for Stephens Group in Little Rock and Clinton served there as governor, Weaver also served as president of Stephens Overseas Services, supervising international operations in the Pacific Rim. Weaver also served as a member of the Board of Visitors of the U.S. Naval Academy. Remember earlier the part about there not being a post for a four-star Admiral and that Larson couldn't be assigned to the U.S. Naval Academy because it has traditionally been a "two-star" billet? With backing from "somewhere in the White House," Weaver transformed the two-star billet U.S. Naval Academy into an unprecedented four-star Admiral billet with an increased assignment from three to four years.

A four-star in a two-star post

Larson stepped out of the maze bearing a coveted four-star assignment as the 55th Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. Will Larson's investment portfolio may reveal he left the maze with much more.
Three months ago Weaver was appointed by Clinton to be the U.S. Representative (read Ambassador) to the European Union. The communist Vietnamese are still refusing to explain what happened to the missing U.S. POWs known to have been alive in their hands during and after the war. When it is discovered how many Judas dollars were funneled to the 1996 re-election campaign of Bill Clinton and from where dollars came, as Paul Harvey might say it, then we will have "the rest of the story."

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