When the administration of US President George W. Bush decided last spring to select Douglas Paal as the next head of the Taipei office of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), a clash between Paal's opponents and supporters in Washington delayed the final decision by months and exposed deep divisions in the capital over US policy toward Taiwan and China.
According to sources in Washington, it was Paal's friends who won, aided by a giant assist from former president George Bush, for whom Paal worked as the top Asia and China expert on the National Security Council.
The White House and the State Department would not comment for this report.
The sources said a group of Washington conservatives had long been leery of Paal in view of public statements he had made over the years which they felt called into question his commitment to Taiwan.
At a June 1998 Washington conference, for instance, Paal reportedly called for a moratorium on arms sales, claiming Taiwan did not know how to use the weapons it already had.
And a Wall Street Journal article in March 2000 on Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) election as President quotes Paal as urging the then administration of president Bill Clinton to delay an arms sale planned for the following month.
"This isn't the time for Taiwan to make new purchases," Paal told reporter Eduardo Lachica.
"A big arms sale could cause complications during this transition period, and it would be inappropriate for the Clinton administration to make a big decision like this."
Opposition to Paal
Paal's opponents saw red in May last year when a transcript circulated of a speech Paal made to a conference in Shanghai via audio hookup from his Washington office that month.
In the transcript, Paal said US President George W. Bush "misspoke" the previous month when he told a television interviewer his administration would do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.
The speech also praised Beijing for adopting a "moderate" stance in the EP-3 spy plane incident and in its response to the arms package to Taiwan Bush agreed to in April.
"The transcript," as the speech became known, was brought to the attention to Karl Rove, Bush's key political advisor, who Paal's opponents saw as a kindred spirit.
At the time, the White House was in the process of selecting a replacement to head AIT's Taipei office in advance of plans to appoint then-representative Raymond Burghardt as ambassador to Vietnam.
At that time Paal was the leading candidate for the post, which was to become vacant in September when Burghardt was set to leave Taipei.
The campaign to derail Paal's selection peaked in late June, when writers Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough brought it into the open with an article in the Washington Times.
They wrote that Paal's selection was "in trouble with congressional Republicans," in both the House and Senate, and said that Paal "has a reputation for being pro-Beijing in the dispute over Taiwan."
Failed bid
Paal had reportedly earlier wanted the post of Ambassador to South Korea, but was turned down. After Paal failed to secure another ambassadorship, former president Bush came to his aid.
"Then `41' intervened and sent him to Taipei," is how one congressional Republican described it to the Taipei Times.
"Forty-one" is a nickname Washington Republicans use when referring to the elder Bush, the 41st US president, to distinguish him with his son, the 43rd president.
Paal was the chief Asia expert in the National Security Council during George Bush's presidency and had served in the CIA and State Department in the Reagan and Bush administrations.
Rove had held up the appointment all summer, and had for a time considered Larry Wortzel, the director of the Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center and a former military attache in Beijing, as an alternative. Wortzel has told the Taipei Times that he never wanted the job.
In August, with the former president backing Paal and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs James Kelly also supporting him, Rove relented and sent the appointment to the State Department for a decision.
At about the same time, questions were raised about the sources of financing for Paal's think tank, the Asia Pacific Policy Center (APPC).
While his appointment was being delayed, Paal had been going through the prolonged background check that all senior US government appointees must undergo, including an extensive investigation into his financial dealings.
Think-tank ties
Among other things, investigators were looking into whether the think tank's ties with Malaysia and into whether the APPC's money came from overseas governments, including China.
After George Bush lost his re-election bid in 1992, Paal formed the APPC and developed a close relationship with Anwar Ibrahim, who was later to become Deputy Prime Minister under Mahathir Mohamad, only to be prosecuted by Mahathir and sentenced to 15 years in prison on what many consider to be politically motivated charges.
In 1999, a year after Anwar's imprisonment, the ruling party's Bank Negara charged Anwar with funneling US$10 million to Paal and the APPC between 1992 and 1997. The party also charged that Anwar was a CIA agent.
Beginning in 1994, APPC held four Pacific conferences in Malaysia together with an Anwar think tank, the Institute of Policy Research (Malaysian acronym IKD). The conferences would make up the bulk of APPC's annual revenue.
But there was nothing wrong with APPC's sources of funding, Paal's colleagues say.
"It was coming from a variety of American and overseas sources," says David G. Brown, associate director of the Asian Studies Department at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who worked at APPC at the time.
"The overseas sources were primarily non-governmental and primarily in Southeast Asia, and part in Malaysia because of the connection that he had at the time with Anwar Ibrahim," he said.
Brown notes that among the attendees were former senator and defense secretary William Cohen, former senator Sam Nunn, who co-sponsored the annual meeting, and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
The conferences "involved people from all over, and there was usually one China, PRC participant, sometimes Taiwan participants, people from Japan, Indonesia and Australia."
No money from China
"But there was no Chinese Government money that I was ever aware of. I can't say for sure whether we didn't get some money from MITI [Japan's trade and industry ministry] or something like that. But I would recall clearly whether we got money from the PRC," Brown said.
That latter comment was in response to allegations that APPC got money from CICIR, the Chinese Institute for Contemporary International Relations, a group said to be part of Beijing's Ministry for State Security, and a regular contributor to overseas think tanks and academic groups.
"We've had people here at SAIS as visiting fellows," says Brown, referring to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
In the end, to Paal's opponents, the funding issue was not the deciding factor.
"The money question is sexy, but the real question is, is this guy the right person for the right job at the right time? And I would argue that he is not," a conservative congressional Republican told the Taipei Times.
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