HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017308.jpg

4.2.12
WC: 191694

which begins:

“No monument stands over Babi Yar
A steep cliff only, like the rudist headstone
I am afraid.”

Now there is a monument, but it is unworthy of that term, and it is not as if the city of Kiev
doesn’t know how to build giant monuments, if it chooses to. In the center of Kiev stands a
monumental statue to Bohdan Khmelnitsky, who had conducted pogroms in the 17th Century that
had slaughtered tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews. To this day, Khmelnitsky’s picture adorns
Ukrainian currency.

It was not an easy visit either for me, for my wife or for my brother (who made a separate visit
with his wife). It was especially difficult for his late wife Marilyn, whose father’s entire family had
lived in the Ukraine, where almost all of them were murdered during the Holocaust. The
difficulty was exacerbated when one of the Ukrainian lawyers with whom I was working was
found dead in his bed just hours after we completed an evening work session and hours before we
were to resume our work in the morning. The official cause of death was ruled a heart attack, but
the KGB—whose role in the case we were investigating—is an expert on giving enemies “heart
attacks.” We were there to save the life and liberty of a Ukrainian political leader and we got
down to work.

President Kuchma immediately told me that although it was his voice on the smoking gun
recording, it was not his words, as least not in the sequence that appeared in the transcript. I
listened to the recording but could not tell very much because the words were Russian and they
were difficult to hear.

I told my client that I too had been the victim of a doctored recording in which my voice and
words had been edited and re-sequenced to make it sound as if I had said the exact opposite of
what I had actually said. 72 This fake recording had been made by a man named David Marriot,
who had offered to be a witness in the Claus Von Bulow case. He had asked me for money and I
told him it would be improper to pay him for his testimony and we wouldn’t do it. He
surreptitiously recorded our conversation on a tape and then simply cut and spliced the tape to
make my refusal to pay him sound like a willingness to pay him. His splicing job was so
amateur—he used scotch tape—that our expert was able to demonstrate it without any question.

But times had changed, and the recording at issue in the Kuchma case had been digital. Changes
on a digital recording are much more difficult to detect than on a tape recording. It was our job
to demonstrate that the Kuchma recording, like mine, had been tampered with to change the
meaning of his words. It would be a challenging scientific task in this new age of recording
technology, but my team was up for it. We retained the most sophisticated audio-scientists in the
world, who were able to demonstrate that words could be digitally re-sequenced to alter the
meaning of a conversation without the change being detectable.

72 In another situation, a television ad by the organization J Street showed a video of my lips moving and a
voice—not mine—saying words that I didn’t say.

221

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017308