What Azerbaijan Wants From Texas Politicians

Texas Monthly

It’s harder to be a moderate in Washington, D.C., than ever before. Nobody knows that better than the veteran centrist Democrat Henry Cuellar, who faces prosecution from the federal government for his work on one of the few remaining bipartisan causes in Texas politics: the glorious nation of Azerbaijan.

A federal grand jury in April indicted Congressman Cuellar, of Laredo, on fourteen counts, including bribery, conspiracy, acting as a foreign agent, and money laundering. Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, are alleged to have used a network of shell companies to hide $600,000 in payoffs from a Mexican bank and an Azerbaijani oil company. For those payments, the feds allege, Cuellar offered concrete deliverables, the “quid” for the “quo.” Prosecutors say Cuellar promised to pressure Biden administration officials to refrain from enforcing regulations on Mexican banks. He also, allegedly, assured the Azerbaijanis that he would back them in Congress.

Cuellar denies the charges. His office did not respond to an interview request from Texas Monthly, but in a full-throated press release about the indictment, Cuellar wrote that “everything [he has] done in Congress has been to serve the people of South Texas.” Nevertheless, his prospects don’t look great. Two consultants with ties to Cuellar have agreed to testify against him. In their plea agreements, they lay out the details of the alleged shell companies and arrangements used to funnel money to the Cuellar family.

For a powerful borderland representative who served as the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee on homeland security (Cuellar was forced to take leave after the indictment), allegations of entanglements with a Mexican bank would seem to make a certain amount of sense. But Azerbaijan’s alleged involvement with Cuellar stood out as a curious detail. To many Americans, Azerbaijan sounds like one of those fake Eastern European countries that produce the villains in Liam Neeson movies.

Azerbaijan is, instead, an oil-rich country that gained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is also a family-run enterprise: only two men have ruled it since 1993—first Heydar Aliyev and then his son, Ilham Aliyev. The nation’s wealth is tied up in the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic, known as SOCAR, over which the Aliyev family exerts significant control. Billboards with Heydar’s face dot the capital city of Baku, as a constant reminder of the family in charge. From 1994 to 2020, Azerbaijan was locked in a mostly frozen military conflict with neighboring Armenia over disputed territory. The promise of this war loomed over everything in Azerbaijan, and it helped bolster an authoritarian political culture. In February, Ilham Aliyev’s government reported that he won 92 percent of the vote in his reelection bid.

Azerbaijan is rich but unfree: journalists and dissidents are dealt with ruthlessly. Several high-profile reporters have been killed  there since independence, and criticizing leaders in public may get you away by the police and beaten. Protests are regularly crushed. Azerbaijan is the kind of country that is often at odds with organizations such as  Amnesty International, the European Court of Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, the Red Cross, and the World Organisation Against Torture. You know, all the baddies.

The irony, though, is that Uncle Joe’s Department of Justice is cracking down on Cuellar for his work on one of the last remaining issues that players across the political spectrum in Texas agree upon: advocacy for the immortal nationhood of Azerbaijan. If that sounds like a joke, it’s on us.

Azerbaijan’s lobbying efforts were a quiet drumbeat in our state for much of the past fifteen years or so. The drumbeat was too soft for almost anyone not in public office to hear, and on the face of it, it seems to have accomplished little except getting Cuellar in trouble. But it’s a revealing influence campaign to explore, because it shows how easy it is for a foreign government to purchase sway in Texas, a state where the political system is purpose-built for that very thing. Azerbaijan’s lobbying was mostly fueled by money, not by voters or popular sentiment. If Azerbaijan is buying influence here, it seems likely that other nations are as well.

I first became curious about the Texas-Azerbaijan connection early in the last decade, when a series of unusual House resolutions popped up in the state legislature. Resolutions are ceremonial, perhaps recognizing a valued constituent or celebrating the pecan tree. In 2013, Houston Democrat Hubert Vo, who still serves in the chamber and did not respond to a request for an interview, offered a resolution “commemorating the 21st anniversary of the Khojaly Massacre in Azerbaijan.” In 2015, Houston Republican Dwayne Bohac, now retired, offered a resolution “commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Black January events in Azerbaijan.”

The subject matter here was unusual. When the House weighs in on foreign affairs, it’s typically for more traditional candidates: Canada, Israel, Mexico. The Azerbaijan resolutions offered clear, uncomplicated takes on some highly contentious history. During Black January, in 1990, Soviet troops launched a bloody crackdown on Azerbaijan’s independence movement. Khojaly is a town where Armenian forces are alleged to have committed war crimes in 1992. The true story of the Khojaly massacre, sometimes called the Khojaly genocide in Azerbaijani accounts, is not something I feel qualified to weigh in on. Members of the Texas House, however, felt plenty qualified to pass a resolution.

It turns out that the 2015 regular session was the third straight in which the Texas Legislature saw resolutions remembering the  massacre. Getting the Legislature on record about the most hotly contested events in Azerbaijan’s history was clearly very important to somebody. Between 2010 and 2021, some 28 state legislatures passed resolutions on the matter—a sort of mirror of Armenian American efforts to get American politicians to recognize the well-documented genocide committed by Turks against Armenians during World War I.

The resolutions were the small, local ends of a transcontinental lobbying operation that has tried to convince Americans that Azerbaijan is a friend worth having. Much of the time, that lobbying operation has run through Houston, home to an office of SOCAR, which has bankrolled some of the advocacy efforts. Much of the lobbying was conducted by a Houston-based nonprofit called the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians.

The Turquoise Council in 2013 was one of the nonprofits to invite ten members of Congress, including four Texans, on an all-expenses-paid trip to Baku, where, per the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative journalism outlet, they were lavished with gifts by their hosts—“hand-woven carpets, crystal tea sets, silk scarves, and and DVDs praising the country’s president.” A reporter for the Washington Diplomat wrote a somewhat hallucinatory account, noting that some members of Congress could barely pronounce the name of the country. The funding for the event was supposed to come from the council, but it actually came from SOCAR, in a violation of congressional rules. (The former head of the Turquoise Council, Kemal Oksuz, was extradited to the U.S. and pleaded guilty to concealing the funding in 2018. He was sentenced to two years probation and time served.) Cuellar has been on a similar junket, which was approved by the House Ethics Committee.

U.S. congressman Ted Poe, a Republican who represented a district north of Houston until 2019, reportedly praised Aliyev’s government as “a free and shining light of democracy in the region,” a sentiment the Diplomat reported was seconded by fellow Texan Rubén Hinojosa, a Democrat who represented McAllen until 2017. Houston Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee reportedly offered more conditional praise: “You live in a very difficult neighborhood,” she told her hosts. “I looked at the map.” Lee did not return an interview request.

The congressional record in the years of peak lobbying activity shows a flurry of statements from members of Congress advocating either for or against Azerbaijani interests. Members of the California delegation as diverse as Los Angeles–area Democrat Adam Schiff and Central Valley Republican Devin Nunes, who rarely agreed, would valorize Armenia. (California is home to a large Armenian American population.) In remarks before the chamber, members of the Texas congressional delegation, including Poe and now retired Houston Democrat Gene Green, would lionize Azerbaijan. Cuellar was always in the mix. On January 24, 2012, the Laredo congressman took the floor to laud the nation as an economic powerhouse with a “freely elected president and parliament.”

In text messages from 2020 released by the feds, Cuellar boasted to Elin Suleymanov, then Azerbaijani ambassador to the U.S., about an amendment he planned to propose to cut funding to Armenia in the 2021 appropriations bill—only to later limply explain that his effort had failed. “It was going to be ruled out of order so I withdrew,” he messaged the diplomat.

In 2012, Governor Rick Perry, who had attracted heat from Azerbaijanis earlier that year for comments slamming the ruling party in Turkey, attended a breakfast funded by an Azerbaijan group at the Republican National Convention, where he spoke of business opportunities in the region. (Turkey and Azerbaijan are close allies and share ethnic ties.) The next year, Perry invited an Azerbaijani delegation to the Governor’s Mansion. Perry’s sister, Milla Perry Jones,  a lobbyist, soon became vice president of the Assembly of the Friends of Azerbaijan, an advocacy group that has received funding from SOCAR and that helped facilitate the Baku trip. (Perry’s sister said the post was “ceremonial” and unpaid.)

Admittedly, this all might seem trivial compared with the millions of dollars that change hands through good old-fashioned domestic political corruption. House speeches and failed legislative maneuvers don’t add up to much. But you could also argue that Azerbaijan got quite a bit for its efforts. For one, the country used positive attention abroad to legitimize the authoritarianism at home, and it muddied the waters of American discourse. With little effort and expense, the Aliyev regime persuaded some important politicians in Texas and the United States—from state legislators to powerful members of Congress—to parrot its talking points and spread them around the political system. In 2015 the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper, ran a sponsored package of articles that touted Azerbaijan and that featured an opinion column by Houston-area congressman Randy Weber. He argued in bright, sunshiny language that it was in America’s interest to maintain a close alliance with the country. “This majority Shiite Muslim nation counts Israel among one [sic] of its closest allies,” Weber wrote. America must “show that we will be a strong and strategic partner to Azerbaijan for years to come.” (Weber did not respond to an interview request.)

Most governments that can afford to do so try to influence public opinion in the United States. There is a tremendous mismatch between American power and the smallness of American politics, prone to petty corruption. The multilayered Republic our founding fathers handed down to us is run by politicians who gain an outsized import when they’re given the chance to meddle in matters of foreign policy. That dynamic often includes a comic dimension.

Consider that in 2012, Egypt elected President Mohamed Morsi. He was the first fairly elected president in the nation’s history, but he was also an Islamist who showed some authoritarian tendencies. His political party, the Muslim Brotherhood, faced deep (and arguably justified) suspicion in the West. In 2013, Morsi’s government was overthrown by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who still governs Egypt. Morsi later died at age 67, while on trial in Cairo, from what the regime described as a heart attack. The Obama administration’s line on the coup was muddled. A few, such as Republican senator John McCain, condemned it and called for fresh elections. Months later, el-Sisi’s regime got an unexpected boost from an unusual place—the city of Tyler, about one hundred miles east of Dallas.

On Egyptian television, Congressman Louie Gohmert praised el-Sisi and vowed that America’s long-standing diplomatic, financial, and military support for Egypt would not be interrupted. Standing with representatives Michele Bachmann and Steve King in front of an American flag, he enthused about being “here in Cairo, where so much of the history of humanity has origins.” They had met with el-Sisi at length, and in Gohmert’s view, he was like George Washington. The two men were military leaders who would lead their nations “down the road to liberty” and then eventually give up power. El-Sisi was “someone we could trust, someone we could work with.” It was an invaluable endorsement from American leaders at a time when relations between the two countries were still unsettled.

Gohmert would never have gotten so much time on television in the U.S. unless a cable news show were poking fun at him. Such backbenchers have little to do at home but offer constituent services and come up with stunts that might get them noticed. But once he left the nation’s borders, he became a sought-after and celebrated avatar for American hegemony. Few Egyptians would have reason to know that these folks were a bit fringe and not very well respected. He got the red-carpet treatment, and he performed in return. (East Texas punches above its weight in the politics of the Muslim world: Charlie Wilson, the late congressman from Lufkin, helped turn the tide of the Soviet-Afghan war by securing arms and funding for the anticommunist mujahideen in the eighties, in exploits immortalized by the book and movie Charlie Wilson’s War.)

Many nations beyond Azerbaijan and Egypt conduct influence-cultivating operations, some more visible than others, usually conforming to the dictates of American law. The Texas Legislature has taken many actions in support of Israel in recent years, among them a set of state sanctions on Iran, as well as laws that ban state contractors from refusing to do business with Israel. (After that law was blocked on First Amendment grounds, Governor Greg Abbott signed a slightly looser version into law.)

In 2016, when Abbott visited Israel, he was provided the use of a Boeing 737 jet owned by casino billionaire and Israel supporter Sheldon Adelson to make the journey free of charge. Adelson, who died in 2021, was a major Republican donor and friend of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and owned Israel’s largest newspaper, the right-wing Israel Hayom. His loan of a jet to Abbott was legal, while the Baku junket was not, though the distinction between the two can feel a little theoretical.

In the case of Azerbaijan, in the end, it got what it most wanted. After 26 years of relative calm, intense fighting broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in September 2020. Armed to the teeth with advanced weapons, Azerbaijan needed an assurance that the great powers—among them the United States, which hosts an influential Armenian diaspora that includes the Kardashian family—would let it finish the job. We did: the Trump administration largely stayed out of it.

In that war, and in a subsequent offensive last year, Azerbaijan smashed Armenia in half. More than 100,000 Armenians were displaced, in what the nation argues is ethnic cleansing. In some regions, Azerbaijan is scraping the earth clean of old Armenian churches and replacing villages with Azerbaijani settlers. The ancient city the Armenians called Stepanakert, after Armenian revolutionary Stepan Shahumian, was rechristened Khankendi. Over the last several years, Azerbaijani lobbying in the States has apparently abated. The country no longer seems to need Randy Weber and Rick Perry. So, a happy ending. Except for Armenia. And for Cuellar.