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Today's
Stories
September 3,
2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: the Bush Neo-Cons and Israel
September 2,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part 3: More Pricks Than Kicks
Max Gimble
Et Tu, Menchu? Extrajudicial Killings and Clandestine Graves
in Guatemala
James Petras
President Chavez and the Referendum: Myths and Realities
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Afghan Electoral Model: "If They Want to Vote
Twice, Let Them"
Todd Chretien & Jessie
Muldoon
Will the Democrats Expel Zell Miller?
Jack Random
Spite and Venom Day: the Turncoat and the Profiteer
Alan Maass
The Real Vietnam
Christa Allen
Contre Bush
Website of
the Day
[Redacted]
September 1,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Stench of Doom
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Poor Larry Franklin
Dave Lindorff
Kerry's Litmus Test
Josh Frank
Protest in White: Not All of New York Rises Up
John L. Hess
Moles, Scoops and Flip Flops
Mike Whitney
Deconstructing Arnold
Jack Random
Kindergarten Night at the RNC
Andrew Wilson
War on the Pachyderms: Why Do Elephants Hate Us?
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part Two: Mark His Words
August 31,
2004
Joseph Nevins
Escapism
and Global Apartheid: The Dominican Republic & the NYTs
Matt Vidal
Beyond
Bush's Rhetoric on the Economy
Neve Gordon
Kerry and the Middle East
Dave Lindorff
Bush
the Peace Candidate?
Mike Whitney
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Jack Random
Opening Night: Playing the War Card
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (Part One)
CounterPunch Photo of the Day
Pete Seeger in NYC
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
September 3, 2004
Serving Two
Flags
The
Bush Neo-Cons and Israel
By
STEPHEN GREEN
[Editors'
Note: This is a slightly updated version of a ground-breaking
essay exposing the relationship of the neo-cons embedded in the
Bush administration with the government of Israel.]
Since 9-11, a small group of "neo-conservatives"
in the Administration have effectively gutted--they would say
reformed--traditional American foreign and security policy.
Notable features of the new Bush doctrine include the pre-emptive
use of unilateral force, and the undermining of the United Nations
and the principle instruments and institutions of international
law....all in the cause of fighting terrorism and promoting homeland
security.
Some skeptics, noting the neo-cons'
past academic and professional associations, writings and public
utterances, have suggested that their underlying agenda is the
alignment of U.S. foreign and security policies with those of
Ariel Sharon and the Israeli right wing. The administration's
new hard line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict certainly suggests
that, as perhaps does the destruction, with U.S. soldiers and
funds, of the military capacity of Iraq, and the current belligerent
neo-con campaign against the other two countries which constitute
a remaining counterforce to Israeli military hegemony in the
region--Iran and Syria.
Have the neo-conservatives--many
of whom are senior officials in the Defense Department, National
Security Council and Office of the Vice President--had dual agendas,
while professing to work for the internal security of the United
States against its terrorist enemies?
A review of the internal security
backgrounds of some of the best known among them strongly suggests
the answer.
Dr. Stephen
Bryen and Colleagues
In April of 1979, Deputy Assistant
Attorney General Robert Keuch recommended in writing that Bryen,
then a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
undergo a grand jury hearing to establish the basis for a prosecution
for espionage. John Davitt, then Chief of the Justice Department's
Internal Security Division, concurred.
The evidence was strong. Bryen
had been overheard in the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop, offering
classified documents to an official of the Israeli Embassy in
the presence of the director of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public
Affairs Committee. It was later determined that the Embassy official
was Zvi Rafiah, the Mossad station chief in Washington. Bryen
refused to be poly-graphed by the FBI on the purpose and details
of the meeting; whereas the person who'd witnessed it agreed
to be poly-graphed and passed the test.
The Bureau also had testimony
from a second person, a staff member of the Foreign Relations
Committee, that she had witnessed Bryen in his Senate office
with Rafiah, discussing classified documents that were spread
out on a table in front of an open safe in which the documents
were supposed to be secured. Not long after this second witness
came forward, Bryen's fingerprints were found on classified documents
he'd stated in writing to the FBI he'd never had in his possession....the
ones he'd allegedly offered to Rafiah.
Nevertheless, following the
refusal of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to grant access
by Justice Department officials to files which were key to the
investigation, Keuch's recommendation for a grand jury hearing,
and ultimately the investigation itself, were shut down. This
decision, taken by Philip Heymann, Chief of Justice's Criminal
Division, was a bitter disappointment to Davitt and to Joel Lisker,
the lead investigator on the case, as expressed to this writer.
A complicating factor in the outcome was that Heymann was a former
schoolmate and fellow U.S. Supreme Court Clerk of Bryen's attorney,
Nathan Lewin.
Bryen was asked to resign from
his Foreign Relations Committee post shortly before the investigation
was concluded in late 1979. For the following year and a half,
he served as Executive Director of the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs (JINSA), and provided consulting services to
AIPAC.
In April, 1981, the FBI received
an application by the Defense Department for a Top Secret security
clearance for Dr. Bryen . Richard Perle, who had just been nominated
as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security
Policy, was proposing Bryen as his Deputy Assistant Secretary!
Within six months, with Perle pushing hard, Bryen received both
Top Secret-SCI (sensitive compartmented information) and Top
Secret-"NATO/COSMIC" clearances.
Loyalty,
Patriotism and Character
The Bryen investigation became
in fact the most contentious issue in Perle's own confirmation
hearings in July, 1981. Under aggressive questioning from Sen.
Jeremiah Denton, Perle held his ground: "I consider Dr.
Bryen to be an individual impeccable integrity....I have the
highest confidence in [his] loyalty, patriotism and character."
Several years later in early
1988, Israel was in the final stages of development of a prototype
of its ground based "Arrow" anti-ballistic missile.
One element the program lacked was "klystrons", small
microwave amplifiers which are critical components in the missile's
high frequency, radar-based target acquisition system which locks
on to in-coming missiles. In 1988, klystrons were among the most
advanced developments in American weapons research, and their
export was of course strictly proscribed.
The DOD office involved in
control of defense technology exports was the Defense
Technology Security Administration
(DTSA) within Richard Perle's ISP office. The Director (and founder)
of DTSA was Perle's Deputy, Dr. Stephen Bryen. In May of 1988,
Bryen sent a standard form to Richard Levine, a Navy tech transfer
official, informing him of intent to approve a license for Varian
Associates, Inc. of Beverly, Massachusetts to export to Israel
four klystrons. This was done without the usual consultations
with the tech transfer officials of the Army and Air Force, or
ISA (International Security Affairs) or DSAA (Defense Security
Assistance Agency.
The answer from Levine was
"no". He opposed granting the license, and asked for
a meeting on the matter of the appropriate (above listed) offices.
At the meeting, all of the officials present opposed the license.
Bryen responded by suggesting that he go back to the Israelis
to ask why these particular items were needed for their defense.
Later, after the Israeli Government came back with what one DOD
staffer described as "a little bullshit answer", Bryen
simply notified the meeting attendees that an acceptable answer
had been received, the license granted, and the klystrons released.
By now, however, the dogs were
awake. Then Assistant Secretary of Defense for ISA, (and now
Deputy Secretary of State) Richard Armitage sent Dr. Bryen a
letter stating that the State Department (which issues the export
licenses) should be informed of DOD's "uniformly negative"
reaction to the export of klystrons to Israel. Bryen did as instructed
, and the license was withdrawn.
In July, Varian Associates
became the first U.S. corporation formally precluded from contracting
with the Defense Department. Two senior colleague in DOD who
wish to remain anonymous have confirmed that this attempt by
Bryen to obtain klystrons for his friends was not unusual, and
was in fact "standard operating procedure" for him,
recalling numerous instances when U.S. companies were denied
licenses to export sensitive technology, only to learn later
that Israeli companies subsequently exported similar (U.S. derived)
weapons and technology to the intended customers/governments.
In late1988, Bryen resigned from his DOD post, and for a period
worked in the
private sector with a variety of defense technology consulting
firms.
Bryen and
the China Commission
In 1997, "Defense Week"
reported (05/27/97) that, ...." the U.S. Office of Naval
Intelligence reaffirmed that U.S.- derived technology from the
cancelled [Israeli] Lavi fighter project is being used on China's
new F-10 fighter." The following year, "Jane's Intelligence
Review" reported (11/01/98) the transfer by Israel to China
of the Phalcon airborne early warning and control system, the
Python air-combat missile, and the F-10 fighter aircraft, containing
"state-of-the-art U.S. electronics."
Concern about the continuing
transfer of advanced U.S. arms technology to the burgeoning Chinese
military program led, in the last months of the Clinton Administration,
to the creation of a Congressional consultative body called the
United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
The charter for the "The China Commission", as it
is commonly known, states that its purpose is to...."monitor,
investigate, and report to the Congress on the national security
implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship
between the United States and the Peoples Republic of China."
The charter also reflects an awareness of the problem of "back
door" technology leaks: "The Commission shall also
take into account patterns of trade and transfers through third
countries to the extent practicable."
It was almost predictable that
in the new Bush Administration, Dr. Stephen Bryen would find
his way to the China Commission. In April 2001, with the support
of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Senator Richard
Shelby (R-Alabama) Bryen was appointed a Member of the Commission
by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Last August, his appointment
was extended through December of 2005.
Informed that Bryen had been
appointed to the Commission, the reaction of one former
senior FBI counter-intelligence official was: "My God, that
must mean he has a "Q
clearance!" (A "Q" clearance, which must be approved
by the Department of Energy, is the designation for a Top Secret
codeword clearance to access nuclear technology.)
Michael
Ledeen, Consultant on Chaos
If Stephen Bryen is the military
technology guru in the neo-con pantheon, Michael Ledeen is currently
its leading theorist, historian, scholar and writer. It states
in the website of his consulting firm, Benador Associates, that
he is "...one of the world's leading authorities on intelligence,
contemporary history and international affairs" and that...."As
Ted Koppel puts it, 'Michael Ledeen is a Renaissance man....in
the tradition of Machiavelli.'" Perhaps the following will
add some color and texture to this description.
In 1983, on the recommendation
of Richard Perle, Ledeen was hired at the Department of Defense
as a consultant on terrorism. His immediate supervisor was the
Principle Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs,
Noel Koch. Early in their work together, Koch noticed with concern
Ledeen's habit of stopping by in his (Koch's) outer office to
read classified materials. When the two of them took a trip to
Italy, Koch learned from the CIA station there that when Ledeen
had lived in Rome previously, as correspondent for The New Republic,
he'd been carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of
a foreign government: Israel.
Some time after their return
from the trip, Ledeen approached his boss with a request for
his assistance in obtaining two highly classified CIA reports
which he said were held by the FBI. He'd hand written on a piece
of paper the identifying "alpha numeric designators".
These identifiers were as highly classified as the reports themselves....which
raised in Koch's mind the question of who had provided them to
Ledeen if he hadn't the clearances to obtain them himself. Koch
immediately told his executive assistant that Ledeen was to have
no further access to classified materials in the office, and
Ledeen just ceased coming to "work".
In early 1986, however, Koch
learned that Ledeen had joined NSC as a consultant, and sufficiently
concerned about the internal security implications of the behavior
of his former aide, arranged to be interviewed by two FBI agents
on the matter. After a two hour debriefing, Koch was told that
it was only Soviet military intelligence penetration that
interested the Bureau. The follow-on interviews that were promised
by the agents just never occurred.
Koch thought this strange,
coming as it did just months after the arrest of Naval intelligence
analyst Jonathan Pollard on charges of espionage for Israel.
Frustrated, Koch wrote up in detail the entire saga of Ledeen's
DOD consultancy, and sent it to the Office of Senator Charles
Grassley, then a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
which had oversight responsibility for, inter alia, the
FBI.
A former senior FBI counter-intelligence
official was surprised and somewhat skeptical, when told of Koch's
unsuccessful attempts to interest the Bureau in an investigation
of Ledeen, noting that in early 1986, the Justice Department
was in fact already engaged in several on-going, concurrent investigations
of Israeli espionage and theft of American military technology.
Machiavelli
in Tel Aviv
Koch's belated attempts to
draw official attention to his former assistant were too late,
in any event, for within a very few weeks of leaving his DOD
consultancy in late 1984, Ledeen had found gainful (classified)
employment at the National Security Council (NSC). In fact, according
to a now declassified chronology prepared for the Senate/House
Iran-
Contra investigation, within calendar 1984 Ledeen was already
suggesting to Oliver
North, his new boss at NSC...." that Israeli contacts might
be useful in obtaining release of the U.S. hostages in Lebanon."
Perhaps significantly, that is the first entry in the
"Chronology of Events: U.S.- Iran Dialogue", dated
November 18,1986, prepared for the Joint House-Senate Hearings
in the Iran-Contra Investigations.
What is so striking about the
Ledeen-related documents which are part of the Iran-Contra Collection
of the National Security Archive, is how thoroughly the judgements
of Ledeen's colleagues at NSC mirrored, and validated, Noel Koch's
internal security concerns about his consultant.
-- on April 9, 1985, NSC Middle
East analyst Donald Fortier wrote to National Security Advisor
Robert McFarlane that NSC staffers were agreed that Ledeen's
role in the scheme should be limited to carrying messages to
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres regarding plans to cooperate
with Israel on the crisis within Iran, and specifically that
he should not be entrusted to ask Peres for detailed operational
information;
- on June 6, 1985, Secretary of State George Shultz wrote to
McFarlane that, "Israel's record of dealings with Iran
since the fall of the Shah and during the hostage crisis [show]
that Israel's agenda is not the same as ours. Consequently doubt
whether an intelligence relationship such as what Ledeen has
in mind would be one which we could fully rely upon and it could
seriously skew our own perception and analysis of the Iranian
scene."
- on 20 August, 1985, the
Office of the Undersecretary of Defense informed Ledeen by memorandum
that his security clearance had been downgraded from Top Secret-SCI
to Secret.
- on 16 January, 1986, Oliver
North recommended to John Poindexter "for [the] security
of the Iran initiative" that Ledeen be asked to take periodic
polygraph examinations.
- later in January, on the
24th, North wrote to Poindexter of his suspicion that Ledeen,
along with Adolph Schwimmer and Manucher Ghorbanifar, might be
making money personally on the sale of arms to Iran, through
Israel.
During the June 23-25, 1987
joint hearings of the House and Senate select committees' investigation
of Iran-Contra, Noel Koch testified that he became suspicious
when he learned that the price which Ledeen had negotiated for
the sale to the Israeli Government of basic TOW missiles was
$2,500 each.
Upon inquiring with his DOD
colleagues, he learned the lowest price the U.S. had ever
received for the sale of TOWs to a foreign government had been
a previous sale to Israel for $6,800 per copy. Koch, professing
in his testimony that he and his colleagues at DOD were not in
favor of the sale to begin with, determined that he--Koch--should
renegotiate the $2,500 price so that it could be defended by
the "defense management system." In a clandestine meeting
on a Sunday in the first class lounge of the TWA section of National
Airport, Koch met over a cup of coffee with an official from
the Israeli purchasing mission in New York, and agreed on a price
of $4,500 per missile, nearly twice what Ledeen had "negotiated"
in Israel.
There are two possibilities
here--one would be a kickback, as suspected by his NSC colleagues,
and the other would be that Michael Ledeen was effectively negotiating
for Israel, not the U.S.
Like his friend Stephen Bryen
(they've long served together on the JINSA Board of Advisors)
Ledeen has been out of government service since the late1980s....until
the present Bush Administration. He, like Bryen, is presently
a serving member on the China Commission and, with the support
of DOD Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, he
has since 2001 been employed as a consultant for the Office of
Special Plans OSP). Both involve the handling of classified materials
and require high-level security clearances.
The Principals
: Perle, Wolfowitz and Feith
One might wonder how, with
security histories like these, Messrs. Bryen and Ledeen have
managed to get second and third chances to return to government
in highly classified positions.
And the explanation is that
they, along with other like-minded neo-conservatives, have in
the current Bush Administration friends in very high places.
In particular, Bryen and Ledeen have been repeatedly boosted
into defense/security posts by current Defense Policy Council
member and former chairman Richard Perle, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas
Feith.
As previously mentioned, Perle
in 1981 as DOD Assistant Secretary for International Security
Policy (ISP) hired Bryen as his Deputy. That same year, Wolfowitz
as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff hired Ledeen
as a Special Advisor. In 2001 Douglas Feith as DOD Under Secretary
for Policy hired, or approved the hiring of Ledeen as a consultant
for the Office of Special Plans.
The principals have also assisted
each other down through the years. Frequently. In 1973 Richard
Perle used his (and Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's)
influence as a senior staff member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee to help Wolfowitz obtain a job with the Arms Control
and Disarmament Agency. In 1982, Perle hired Feith in ISP as
his Special Counsel, and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary for
Negotiations Policy. In 2001, DOD Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz
helped Feith obtain his appointment as Undersecretary for Policy.
Feith then appointed Perle as Chairman of the Defense Policy
Board. In some cases, this mutual assistance carries risks, as
for instance when Perle's hiring of Bryen as his Deputy in ISP
became an extremely contentious issue in Perle's own Senate appointment
hearings as Assistant Secretary.
Every appointment/hiring listed
above involved classified work for which high-level security
clearances and associated background checks by the FBI were required.
When the level of the clearance is not above generic Top Secret,
however, the results of that background check are only seen by
the hiring authority. And in the event, if the appointee were
Bryen or Ledeen and the hiring authority were Perle, Wolfowitz
or Feith, the appointee(s) need not have worried about the findings
of the background check. In the case of Perle hiring Bryen as
his deputy in 1981, for instance, documents released in 1983
under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the Department
provided extraordinarily high clearances for Bryen without having
reviewed more than a small portion of his 1978-79 FBI investigation
file.
RICHARD
PERLE: A HABIT OF LEAKING
Perle came to Washington for
the first time in early 1969, at the age of 28, to work for
a neo-con think tank called the "Committee to Maintain a
Prudent Defense Policy." Within months, Senator Henry "Scoop"
Jackson offered Perle a position on his staff, working with the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And within months after that--less
than a year--Perle was embroiled in his first security inquiry.
An FBI wiretap authorized for the Israeli embassy in Washington
picked up Perle discussing with an Embassy official classified
information which he said had been supplied by a staff member
of the National Security Council. An NSC/FBI investigation to
identify the staff member quickly focused upon Helmut Sonnenfeldt.
The latter had been previously investigated in 1967 while he
was a staff member of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence
and Research, for suspected to an Israeli Government official
of a classified document concerning the commencement of the 1967
war in the Middle East.
Perle's second brush with the
law occurred in 1978. He was the recipient of a classified CIA
report on alleged past Soviet treaty violations. The leaker (and
author) of the report was CIA analyst David Sullivan. CIA Director
Stansfield Turner was incensed at the unauthorized disclosure,
but before he could fire Sullivan, the latter quit. Turner urged
Sen. Jackson to fire Perle, but he was let off with a reprimand.
Jackson then added insult to injury by immediately hiring Sullivan
to his staff. Sullivan and Perle became close friends and co-conspirators,
and together established an informal right-wing network which
they called "the Madison Group," after their usual
meeting place in--you might have guessed--the Madison Hotel Coffee
Shop.
In 1981, shortly before being
appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security
Policy (ISP)--with responsibility, inter alia, for monitoring
of U.S. defense technology exports, Richard Perle was paid a
substantial consulting fee by arms manufacturer Tamares, Ltd.
of Israel. Shortly after assuming that post, Perle wrote a letter
to the Secretary of the Army urging evaluation and purchase of
155 mm. shells manufactured by Soltam, Ltd. After leaving the
ISP job in 1987, he worked for Soltam.
PAUL WOLFOWITZ
: A WELL PLACED FRIEND
In 1973, in the dying days
of the Nixon Administration, Wolfowitz was recruited to work
for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). There was
a certain irony in the appointment, for in the late 1960's, as
a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Wolfowitz had
been a student and protege of Albert Wohlstetter, an influential,
vehement opponent of any form of arms control or disarmament,
vis a vis the Soviets. Wolfowitz also brought to ACDA a strong
attachment to Israel's security, and a certain confusion about
his obligation to U.S. national security.
In 1978, he was investigated
for providing a classified document on the proposed sale of
U.S. weapons to an Arab government, to an Israel Government official,
through an AIPAC intermediary. An inquiry was launched and dropped,
however, and Wolfowitz continued to work at ACDA until 1980.
In 1990, after a decade of
work with the State Department in Washington and abroad, Wolfowitz
was brought into DoD as Undersecretary for Policy by then Secretary
of Defense Richard Cheney. Two years later, in 1992, the first
Bush Administration launched a broad inter-departmental investigation
into the export of classified technology to China. O particular
concern at the time was the transfer to China by Israel of U.S.
Patriot missiles and/or technology. During that investigation,
in a situation very reminiscent of the Bryen/Varian Associates/klystrons
affair two years earlier, the Pentagon discovered that Wolfowitz's
office was promoting the export to Israel of advanced AIM-9M
air-to-air missiles.
In this instance, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, aware that Israel had already been caught selling
the earlier AIM 9-L version of the missile to China in violation
of a written agreement with the U.S. on arms re-sales, intervened
to cancel the proposed AIM (-M deal. The Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs at the time was General Colin Powell, currently Secretary
of State.
Wolfowitz continued to serve
as DoD Undersecretary for Policy until 1993, well into the Clinton
Administration. After that, however, like most of the other prominent
neo-conservatives, he was relegated to trying to assist Israel
from the sidelines for the remainder of Clinton's two terms.
In 1998, Wolfowitz was a co-signer of a public letter to the
President organized by the "Project for the New American
Century." The letter, citing Saddam Hussein's continued
possession of "weapons of mass destruction," argued
for military action to achieve regime change and demilitarization
of Iraq. Clinton wasn't impressed, but a more gullible fellow
would soon come along.
And indeed, when George W.
Bush assumed the Presidency in early 2001, Wolfowitz got his
opportunity. Picked as Donald Rumsfeld's Deputy Secretary at
DoD, he prevailed upon his boss to appoint Douglas Feith as Undersecretary
for Policy. On the day after the destruction of the World Trade
Center, September 12, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz raised the possibility
of an immediate attack on Iraq during an emergency NSC meeting.
The following day, Wolfowitz conducted the Pentagon press briefing,
and interpreted the
President's statement on "ending states who sponsor terrorism"
as a call for regime change in Iraq. Israel wasn't mentioned.
Douglas
Feith: Hardliner, Security Risk
Bush's appointment of Douglas
Feith as DoD Undersecretary for Policy in early 2001 must have
come as a surprise, and a harbinger, even to conservative veterans
of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administration. Like Michael
Ledeen, Feith is a prolific writer and well-known radical
conservative. Moreover, he was not being hired as a DoD consultant,
like Ledeen, but as the third most senior United States Defense
Department official. Feith was certainly the first, and probably
the last high Pentagon official to have publicly opposed the
Biological Weapons Convention (in 1986), the Intermediate Nuclear
Forces Treaty (in 1988), the Chemical Weapons Convention (in
1997), the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (in 2000), and all of
the various Middle East Peace agreements, including Oslo (in
2000).
Even more revealing perhaps,
had the transition team known of it, was Feith's view of "technology
cooperation," as expressed in a 1992 Commentary article:
"It is in the interest of U.S. and Israel to remove needless
impediments to technological cooperation between them. Technologies
in the hands of responsible, friendly countries facing military
threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance
regional stability and promote peace thereby."
What Douglas Feith had neglected
to say, in this last article, was that he thought that individuals
could decide on their own whether the sharing of classified information
was "technical cooperation," an unauthorized disclosure,
or a violation of U.S. Code 794c, the "Espionage Act."
Ten years prior to writing
the Commentary piece, Feith had made such a decision on his own.
At the time, March of 1972, Feith was a Middle East analyst in
the Near East and South Asian Affairs section of the National
Security Council. Two months before, in January, Judge William
Clark had replaced Richard Allen as National Security Advisor,
with the intention to clean house. A total of nine NSC staff
members were fired, including Feith, who'd only been with the
NSC for a year. But Feith was fired because he'd been the object
of an inquiry into whether he'd provided classified material
to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. The FBI
had opened the inquiry. And Clark, who had served in U.S. Army
counterintelligence in the 1950's, took such matters very seriously.....more
seriously, apparently, than had Richard Allen.
Feith did not remain unemployed
for long, however. Richard Perle, who was in 1982 serving in
the Pentagon as Assistant secretary for International Security
Policy, hired him on the spot as his "Special Counsel,"
and then as his Deputy. Feith worked at ISP until 1986, when
he left government service to form a small but influential law
firm, then based in Israel.
In 2001, Douglas Feith returned
to DoD as Donald Rumsfeld's Undersecretary for Policy, and it
was in his office that "OSP", the Office of Special
Plans, was created. It was OSP that originated--some say from
whole cloth--much of the intelligence that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld
have used to justify the attack on Iraq, to miss-plan the post-war
reconstruction there, and then to point an accusing finger at
Iran and Syria.....all to the absolute delight of Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon.
Reason for Concern
Many individuals with strong
attachments to foreign countries have served the U.S. Government
with honor and distinction, and will certainly do so in the future.
The highest officials in our executive and legislative branches
should, however, take great care when appointments are made to
posts involving sensitive national security matters. Appointees
should be rejected who have demonstrated, in their previous government
service, a willingness to sacrifice U.S. national security interests
for those of another country, or an inability to distinguish
one from the other.
Stephen Green is a freelance journalist in Vermont.
He can be reached at: green@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
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Fred Gardner
Run
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Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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