Poland's Defense Minister Radek Sikorski a neo-con protege

January 4, 2006 -- Polish Defense Minister a neo-con protege. Poland's Defense Minister Radek Sikorski, a veteran senior fellow of the neo-con citadel, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is the new darling of the neo-con media, being hailed as a "visionary" by the New York Sun, a noted neo-con outlet. Polish intelligence sources report that Sikorski became a U.S. intelligence asset during the Reagan Cold War years. Sikorski was a Solidarity leader in the 1970s. He was visiting Britain in 1981 when martial law was declared in Poland. In 1984 Sikorski became a British citizen.

Sikorski operated under the cover of a journalist in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan during the mid 1980s and in Angola in the late 1980s where he liaised with pro-U.S. UNITA guerrillas backed by apartheid South Africa and noted GOP activists, including recently convicted Jack Abramoff as well as Karl Rove friend and adviser Grover Norquist. In 2002, after Angola's government killed UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi with the help of Kellogg, Brown & Root military advisers, Sikorski penned an anti-Savimbi screed in the neo-con Wall Street Journal, dismissing his old friend and the man Ronald Reagan called the "George Washington of Africa" as a pro-Mao closeted Leninist who practiced voodoo and believed in Kwame Nkrumah and Leopold Senghor-style black consciousness ("negritude").

Sikorski is married to U.S. journalist Anne Applebaum, who serves on the editorial board of The Washington Post and dismisses the use of the term "neo-con" as paranoia aimed at discrediting the "themed revolutions" in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and other "pro-democracy" neo-con initiatives like the debacle in Iraq. [For more on the Washington Post, see today's guest column].

While at AEI from 2002 to 2005, Sikorski also served as director of the New Atlantic Initiative, a neo-con contrivance that counts among its adherents Kateryna Chumachenko Yushchenko and her husband, Viktor Yushchenko, the "Orange Revolution" President of Ukraine. Chumachenko served in the Reagan White House and State and Treasury Departments and later worked for KPMG as "Katherine Chumachenko." Chumachenko worked in the White House Public Liaison Office where she conducted outreach to various right-wing and anti-communist exile groups in the United States, including the other bastion of the neo-cons, The Heritage Foundation and Friends of Afghanistan, on whose board Afghan refugee and current Bush pro-consul in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, sat. Khalilzad, like Chumachenko, worked in the Reagan State Department. Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent cut-off of natural gas to Ukraine, Poland, and other countries was a clear warning shot about the influence of neo-cons and exiled Israeli-based Russian oligarchs in Eastern Europe and Polish and Ukrainian backing for further U.S. military adventures in the Middle East, including attacks on Iran and Syria.