Harvard Boys

In the late 1970s, a little piece of good news whispered at CIA headquarters in the small town of Langley, Virginia reached Moscow very quickly. It echoed off the Kremlin’s high, imposing walls: “We’ve got a guy in the Politburo!” The identity of the CIA agent who managed to infiltrate or be selected for the USSR’s Politburo was debated within closed circles for years. The likelihood that it was Mikhail Gorbachev, who rapidly rose to the top echelons of the Politburo and became the premier who finally dissolved the expansive empire, seemed to outweigh that of the other candidates.

Clearly, the CIA didn’t stop at infiltrating the Politburo, but also invaded the topmost cadres of the post-Soviet era.

We first learned about this in Vladimir Putin’s annual question-and-answer session, which took place last week. In this three-hour and 42-minute session, in which Putin answered 85 out of the 3 million questions sent to him, he spoke about the economic reforms of the 1990s and how they became corrupt. “You all know that in that period [when Boris Yeltsin was president of the Russian Federation and Viktor Chernomyrdin was at the head of the government], Assistant Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais was in charge of the privatization programs. Chubais’ closest advisers had Harvard University professor business cards, but were actually CIA agents. When the two returned to the U.S., they were tried by the CIA for using their position for personal gain…”*

Let’s take a look at Russia during this period.

Chubais established an organization called the Russian Privatization Center aimed at carrying out his privatization program. The World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the U.S. Agency for International Development, a variety of European governments and Japan all financed this organization.

The Russian Privatization Center wasn’t a government organization but an nongovernmental organization, and how convenient that it was receiving help from Harvard University!

The advisers created a plan to privatize Russia that was in line with U.S. economic policy and reconstruction plans. Around Moscow these advisers were known as the “Harvard boys.”

What we know today as “oligarchs” emerged as products of this strategy. During these years, the Russian people went hungry, begging in public. The Red Army raided potato fields in order to feed its soldiers.

All of this carried the brand name of the CIA agents — or “Harvard boys” — Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay, mentioned by Putin. They sought to benefit from the flood of privatization, commandeering two very valuable companies along with Russian business partners.

With blood on their hands, it’s said that they returned from Russia each with a $500 million fortune. Upon returning, they were tried in Boston for using their CIA position for personal gain. The punishment? Peanuts: They got away with a $2 million penalty.

The Russian people eventually forgot the two advisers, but not Anatoly Chubais, who was in charge during that impoverished and merciless period. In fact, there’s a saying from that dark time: “I was going to throw myself off a cliff I was so miserable, but then I realized that Chubais had privatized the cliff.”

What is Anatoly Chubais doing now? He’s got a $2 million fortune! And he’s just the tip of the iceberg…

*Translator’s note: This speech was translated from Turkish, not from the original Russian.