Ukraine cooperates with FBI (03/31/96)

Ukraine cooperates with FBI

by Yaro Bihun
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

WASHINGTON - Ukraine has indicated to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that it is interested in conducting a joint investigation of the reported use of Ukrainian planes by Colombian drug traffickers.

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh told a Senate panel on March 13 that he has had official contact from Ukraine on the case since the allegations surfaced in a Los Angeles Times story during Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma's visit to Washington in February.

Ukraine has denied any official involvement in the misuse of the Antonov 23Bs, which, it says, were leased by a Ukrainian non-government enterprise for legal purposes.

Asked about the case by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) during a hearing before the Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Mr. Freeh said he spoke about it with an official of the Interior Ministry of Ukraine.

"He indicated that the president of Ukraine, President Kuchma, is very concerned and interested in having an operation, a joint investigative operation, where we can look at this problem and see whether any laws have been violated in the United States. So, yes, we will follow up on that."

When such an investigation begins, some of the Ukrainian investigators involved may be very familiar with FBI investigative procedures, since Ukraine has been taking part in a special FBI law enforcement training program for the new democracies of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The main thrust of FBI Director Freeh's Senate testimony focused on this and related programs funded by the Freedom Support Act (FSA) and the Support for Eastern European Democracies (SEED), which in 1995 trained some 1,800 law enforcement officers from Ukraine, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Romania and Moldova. The program is being expanded this year to include Belarus, Slovenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Bulgaria and Albania, Mr. Freeh said.

"Since the first of this year, in only several months, we've trained 150 police officers from the Russian Federation, as well as Ukraine," Mr. Freeh said.

He said he recently visited the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., where the Russian and Ukrainian officers were studying, among other things, internal police controls - "how we police the police, how we monitor each other, how we ensure that we have a police leadership and a rank and file which is corruption-free, which understands the principles of due process."

The FBI director recalled that a Ukrainian general came to him after he addressed one of the classes and said "that he could not imagine even a short time ago that the Americans, the FBI in particular, would be offering and teaching them a course in police ethics, and was just overwhelmed with the fact that we cared enough to share that expertise with him."

In addition to the training program offered at the FBI Academy in Quantico, a similar intensive eight-week course is conducted at the U.S.-funded International Law Enforcement Training Academy in Budapest. The over-all program also includes two-week "in-country" training programs.

Mr. Freeh said that "the single most significant factor" in the FBI's ability to detect, deter and investigate international crimes is the "legal attache program," which now has 70 senior bureau agents working on coordinating crime-fighting activities in 23 countries, including Russia.

The FBI director explained that the presence of an FBI attache at an embassy has to be requested and approved by the U.S. ambassador. "We've gone through that process, for instance, in Ukraine, in Poland, in some of the other countries; the ambassadors have concurred in our request," he said.

The United States recognized the need to help upgrade the law enforcement capabilities of former Eastern Bloc countries and to coordinate crime-fighting efforts with them soon after the fall of communism in that region.

"The political, social and economic changes occurring in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet republics have provided significant, unintended opportunities for organized crime groups and criminal enterprises in these counties to expand internationally," Mr. Freeh said. "Evidence that organized crime activity from these areas is expanding and will continue to expand to the United States is well-documented."

"Grave crime is no longer bound by the constraints of borders. Such offenses as terrorism, nuclear smuggling, organized crime, computer crime and drug trafficking can spill over from other countries into the United States." he said.

In addition to the training and attache programs, as Sen. McConnell pointed out, his subcommittee earmarked funds for "an initiative I strongly support to develop FBI-like institutions in Ukraine and Kazakhstan."

Asked by Sen. McConnell if the budget was sufficient to fund "the creation of FBls in Ukraine and Kazakhstan," Mr. Freeh replied: "If we applied the $5.5 million (the current average of annual funds available), yes, sir, that would certainly be more than enough."

Asked about the possible formation of an "FBI" in Ukraine, a spokesman of the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington said the creation of a new "national bureau of investigation" has been the subject of public discussion over the past year.

The spokesman added that, following the recent anti-terrorism summit in Egypt, the Ukrainian government is studying a proposal to create an "anti-terrorism center" that would coordinate the work of the various law enforcement agencies in Ukraine. This would be done, hopefully, with Western and American assistance, he said.

The spokesman said Ukraine's law enforcement agencies maintain regular contacts with the FBI in such areas as combating illegal drug and arms trafficking.

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