What a Night: no expense spared to honor Azerbaijan's first lady

By Ken Silverstein

On Wednesday, I posted a story that mentioned a private reception and dinner held last night at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium to honor Mehriban Aliyeva, the first lady of Azerbaijan. The affair was sponsored by the United States–Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (USACC), an oil industry–funded outfit whose top officials include James Baker, formerly secretary of state and currently the recipient of copious good press for his role as co-chair of the Iraq Study Group. Yesterday, I received a firsthand account of the dinner—which was sponsored by USACC members such as ChevronTexaco, BP, and ConocoPhillips—courtesy of a friendly spy.

In addition to the first lady's humanitarian duties, which I discussed on Wednesday, Aliyeva also heads up the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, charged with honoring the memory of her dear departed father-in-law (who served as Azerbaijan's president until his death in 2003). The Foundation's website lauds Heydar for his commitment to democracy and human rights, and features an ever-changing series of his most uplifting aphorisms, such as, “In general the mankind has been existing and developing by creating and building-constructing.” (A less flattering look at Heydar can be found at diacritica.com, which describes him as a “protege of . . . KGB henchmen like Yuri Andropov,” and as a man who “stabbed, stole and strong-armed his way to power.”) “Distinguished Guests” who have visited the Foundation include a delegation from “Saudi Arabia's General Organization for Social Insurance,” a youth group from Guam, and the Baroness Ocahoyn of Great Britain's House of Lords.

There were hundreds of people in attendance at the USACC gala, said my spy, including numerous officials from the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and other government agencies. The guests were served a variety of fine wines, an assortment of appetizers that included lamb tenderloin on grilled focaccia and buckwheat blinis topped with caviar and crème fraiche , and a choice of cumin-rubbed beef tenderloin or salmon filet with a pomegranate glaze (served on fine china, of course). For entertainment, there was live music and a dance troupe from Azerbaijan, and each guest was offered a goodie bag stuffed with a small carpet, a photo album about Azerbaijan, and other jazzy bric-a-brac. “I go to a lot of these sorts of things,” said my source. “I haven't seen a more lavish affair since the dot.com boom.”

And where was James Baker, who, as partner at the law firm of Baker Botts, has business interests in Azerbaijan and other Caspian countries? His mind or his schedule must have been otherwise occupied—but his son Jamie, a lawyer at the firm, stood in as MC. Baker the Younger presented the first lady with an award from the USACC—our man on the inside believes it was called the “Goodwill Ambassador Award”—and a glass statuette of a blue angel with white wings. Very classy. Among the speakers was Senator Richard Lugar, the outgoing head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He couldn't bring himself to mention directly the subject of widespread human rights violations in Azerbaijan, so while he alluded to nebulous “shortcomings” on the part of the regime, his focus was on the need for cooperation in the fields of terrorism and energy security.

Sounds like quite a party. Why, you ask, would Washingtonians so gladly toady to this woman? As I noted yesterday, the first lady is a member of parliament and could potentially succeed her husband, President Ilham Aliyev, who has been implicated by the U.S. Justice Department as the recipient of bribes from a firm called Oily Rock. (A reader of yesterday's story emailed to remind me that George Mitchell, the former Democratic Senate majority leader, received big bucks to serve as Oily Rock's vice-chairman.) Ilham and Mehriban head a crooked, authoritarian regime, but one that's oil-rich and strategically located—which, by definition, makes it a key American ally.

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