Robert D. Thompson
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In November 1996 'Robert D. Thompson (Bob) was working for the Kreible Institute (KI) which funded and controlled (along with the Heritage Institutes and Heritage Foundation) the promotion of Republican-right market-philosophies through dozens of Eastern European think-tanks. Thompson was then reporting to Robert H. Krieble, Diana J. Weyrich and Paul M. Weyrich.
A Philip Morris copy of an e-mail from Thompson lists the various TV stations in Eastern Europe which are willing to show the video of the Freedom's Challenge program; he describes where the program will go to for a free showing. Production of the program was then under the control of foreign policy expert Paula Dobriansky. [[1]]. This was part of the NET (National Educational Television) organisation, funded by Krieble and a number of large US corporations who wanted to get a toe-hold in the ex-Soviet territories. NET was run by the Weyrichs.
At this time Freedom's Challenge was promoting a tobacco-funded attack on the World Health Organisation. It did this through a videotaped interview with:
- John Bolton the former Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs (who looked after the United Nations and its agencies) who was then the president of the National Policy Forum, and
- Paul G. Dietrich. a notorious tobacco lobbyist, who had run front-organisations for the tobacco industry (inluding the Saturday Review magazine and the Institute for International Health & Development) for most of his life.
They were recommending the withdrawal of all US funding from WHO on the basis that it was wasting money with "tobacco control campaigns". This was singled out as an example of wasted expenditure ... along with the claim that the WHO ran numerous conferences in exotic locations, ie. "islands with beautiful beaches'. This was an old theme of many of Dietrich's anti-WHO diatribes; he worked for many years to discredit the WHO for the US Tobacco Institute, Philip Morris and British American Tobacco. [2] He also later claimed to have been paid by the US State Department to discredit the Secretary General of the WHO, Dr Nakajima, who had been elected to the position despite US objections.
The connections between these Bolton and Dietrich was much deeper than just a shared Republican philosophy. Paul Dietrich's wife was Laura Jordan Dietrich. And in the early days of the Reagan Administration, she was a well-known "Bolton Girl" (staff assistants who partnered him to official functions since he was a gay batchelor).
Laura Jordan (she sometimes used her unmarried name) rose through the State Department heirarch to become the favoured assistant of Bolton. President Reagan later elevated her to the position of US Commissioner of Human Rights, which provided her with status in Geneva at the United Nations -- and, by no coincidence at all -- this was the same position later occupied by Paula Dobriansky herself during the Bush II Administration This was an incestuous circle.
By mid1999, Thompson had become the Vice President of Coalitions for America which was created, at least partly, to fight President Clinton's Federal law-suits against tobacco. Paul M Weyrich was the National Chairman. [3]
