Setup on K street: sting operations on sleazeball lobbyists aren't what they used to be.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship - Book review

Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship

by Ken Silverstein

Random House, 224 pp.

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Last year, Ken Silverstein, an investigative reporter and the Washington editor of Harper's magazine, lit upon a splendid idea: he would pose as the representative of a fictitious British investment firm whose huge holdings in the energy-rich, diabolically ruled Turkmenistan had inspired the company, the opaquely named Maldon Group, to spruce up the image of the corrupt and criminal regime. Using the name Kenneth Case, and bearing as his premier qualification a canny marriage to Maldon's chairman's daughter, Silverstein angled to meet with Washington's wealthiest, best connected--and, on the basis of information and belief--most cynical and least principled lobbying firms, aiming to receive their thoughts about how to burnish Turkmenistan's image, improve its relations with the U.S. government, and obtain better coverage of the country from the news media.

Silverstein's idea, the pursuit of which he first chronicled in Harper's and now covers in Turkmeniscam, was enterprising, but not altogether new. In 1992, the journalist Art Levine (a contributing editor of this magazine) wrote an article for Spy magazine (where I was an editor) on the topic of Washington's greediest, sleaziest lobbyists. As part of that story, a Spy staffer posed as a representative of a Bremerhaven-based neo-Nazi group that sought a lobbyist to help the organization rid Germany of immigrants, counter Jewish influence in Congress, and reclaim Poland. These ambitions were too outrageous for most of the lobbyists tested, but a flamboyant and notoriously accommodating figure named Edward J. von Kloberg III--the yon was purely an affectation, and perhaps everything else was, too--tried to land the contract. "I believe in many of the tenets that you believe in," he said, and unguently pointed to David Duke as a sign that the climate in this country might be turning favorably for their goals. He hung himself with every word he uttered.

Von Kloberg--who committed suicide three years ago by jumping from the parapet of a castle in Rome--never quite recovered from that exposure. The lobbying industry, however, not only endured, but triumphed: shrugging off exposures, absorbing half-hearted efforts at reform, spitting out Jack Abramoffs and Duke Cunninghams for whom enough was never enough, and turning the last decade into the Golden...