Neocon middle management
Lesser Neocons of L'Affaire Plame by Christopher Deliso @balkanalysis.com
From start to finish, the Niger deception and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame depended on a relay team of hawkish officials providentially placed throughout various government agencies. These included the CIA, the Pentagon and its Office of Special Plans (now under official investigation by the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General), the State Department, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), performing a handoff of information from the point of origin (the CIA) to the ultimate "commissioners" of the inquiry, the masterminds in the White House and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Considering the frequently attested intra- and interfactional nature of all of these agencies, it is understandable why the highest officials in the land jostled to get their "people" strategically inserted throughout the departments, where they could garner inside information and hinder the objectives of their ostensibly direct employers whenever they conflicted with the goals of their real minders.
Aside from the high-visibility officials involved or presumably involved in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame – Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, etc. – we also have a generous sprinkling of neocons who, while somewhat less well known, have played a crucial role in not only the Plame outing but in policy-crafting and, perhaps, criminal activities as well.
The present study considers four such figures: David Wurmser and Frederick Fleitz, both formerly employed in the State Department office of the Madman with the Handlebar Mustache, John Bolton; Marc Grossman, a longtime State Department official recently turned lobbyist; and Eric Edelman, like Grossman a former ambassador to Turkey, longtime Cheneyite, and current recess appointee to Doug Feith's old position as No. 3 in the Pentagon.
John Bolton's Attack Dogs
While he has always been an outspoken opponent of arms control of all kinds, John Bolton was assigned to precisely that brief by the Bush administration in May 2001. Now his brief has been changed to acting UN ambassador, though he has in the past called for the cessation of the world body. At least he's consistent in his perversity.
On Oct. 27, on the eve of the Libby indictment, Richard Sale reported that according to "several former and serving U.S. intelligence officials," Libby was told of Plame's CIA identity via a phone call that "definitely came from the State Department office of John Bolton, then the arms control chief of the department."
More specifically, says Sale, Bolton assistants David Wurmser and Frederick Fleitz were part of the relay team responsible for leaking Plame's identity to Libby and then to Novak and Miller. "These same sources alleged that Wurmser, as Bolton's special assistant, got his knowledge of Plame's classified identity from a colleague in his office, Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer detailed to Bolton's office from the agency who worked in the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center (WINIPAC)." Gary Leupp's Nigergate timeline of Nov. 9, 2005, gives further details on their involvement.
David Wurmser: A Blowhard Empowered
Bolton's attack dogs come from the very heart of the neocon establishment. It was Wurmser, after all, who largely wrote the now-infamous 1996 policy paper urging an invasion of Iraq for the sake of Israel: "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." Among the signers were Doug Feith and Richard Perle. Another was Wurmser's wife, Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser, director of Middle East studies at the neocon-friendly Hudson Institute.
Out of power but continuing to skulk around the AEI with his neocon comrades, Wurmser handed out yet more free advice in a similar study published in 2000 by neocon Daniel Pipe's Middle East Forum and Ziad Abdelnour's U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon; it "advocated a wider U.S. role in Lebanon":
"The study, 'Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: The U.S. Role?' called for the United States to force Syria from Lebanon and to disarm it of its alleged weapons of mass destruction. It also argued that 'Syrian rule in Lebanon stands in direct opposition to American ideals' and criticized the United States for engaging rather than confronting the regime. Among the documents signers were several soon-to-be Bush administration figures, including Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Michael Rubin, and Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky. Other signers included Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Ledeen, and Frank Gaffney."
When the neocons started feeling their oats with the return to power of a Republican administration later that year, hawks like Wurmser were locked and loaded to put these ideas into practice. With 9/11 came their ultimate opportunity. As Raw Story reports:
"[S]hortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Wurmser was handpicked by Harold Rhode, a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon 'think tank,' and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to head a top secret Pentagon 'cell' whose job was to comb through CIA intelligence documents and find evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States and its neighbors in the Middle East so a case could be made to launch a preemptive military strike. Wurmser largely invented evidence that Iraq had close ties to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden."
Wurmser's two-man "cell" was officially known as the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, and was based in "a windowless, cipher-locked room at the Pentagon." In order to expedite Wurmser's "research," Feith and Rhode had to perform some "softening-up" operations on the professional intelligence community. A Jan. 26, 2004, report from Mother Jones explains their methods like this:
"[A]ccording to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be 'pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with,' says a former analyst. 'They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the f*ck out of there.'
Frederick Fleitz: Dual-Use Technology Personified
For his part, Fleitz was an old confidante of Bolton's and "on loan" to his office from the CIA. A State Department intelligence analyst on WMD, Greg Thielman, told Seymour Hersh in 2003 that Bolton "surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get CIA information directly." Bolton affirmed for Hersh that he had demanded and received "direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous administrations, such data had been made available to undersecretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specific secured offices of the INR [the State Department intelligence branch]."
That Bolton's boys would betray Valerie Plame should come as no surprise, considering their consistently vicious previous tactics with intelligence officers who resisted their orders to make the intelligence fit their case. In April 2005, the New York Times reported on several antagonistic e-mails sent during 2002 by Fleitz to Christian Westermann, "the State Department's top expert on biological weapons," who also worked under Thielman.
Apparently, John Bolton could not tolerate the "wimpy" language that the INR recommended he use in a speech about Cuba. The always bellicose Bolton sought to accuse Cuba of developing biological weapons – a prospect even more fanciful than Iraq's alleged ambitions in the field. In any case, the war of attrition had its effect on Westermann, who on Sept. 23, 2002, wrote a high-ranking INR official, Thomas Fingar, stating that the incessant attacks from Bolton/Fleitz were "affecting my work, my health, and [my] dedication to public service."
Westermann, a career naval officer, was moved in 2000 to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation. In 2005, he testified in a Senate hearing [.pdf] that "Mr. Bolton was very unhappy that a working level analyst [i.e., himself] had the temerity to alter language that he wanted to say." Regarding Fleitz, Westermann revealed that "Fred was a conduit for Mr. Bolton to receive other information [from the CIA] … there were times that material flowed from other agencies to Undersecretary Bolton not through INR." Frank affirmations of Bolton's abusive nature while in the State Department were made at his April 2005 UN confirmation hearings by Carl W. Ford Jr., Westermann's ultimate boss at the INR.
Marc Grossman: A Dark Horse Candidate?
It's clear that Cheney assistant Libby thought to ask John Bolton about the identity of the CIA's "secret envoy" to Niger (i.e., Wilson) because he recognized that the WMD-focused brief of Bolton and Fleitz meant they had a good chance of finding out who was behind Joe Wilson's trip to Africa. They also shared Libby's neocon ideology. In short, they were people he could count on.
But why, then, did Libby also ask a non-WMD specialist like Marc Grossman? How was he in a position to help, and why did Libby believe he could be trusted with the mission?
Although Grossman "has not been as high profile in the press" FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds cryptically told me the other day, "don't overlook him – he is very important."
She was not speaking about the Plame affair, though Grossman did indeed have a key role there, as we will see. According to her, Grossman was one of three officials – the other two, she says, are Richard Perle and Douglas Feith – who had been watched by both Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA team, and by the major FBI investigation of organized crime and governmental corruption on which she herself was working until being terminated in April 2002.
Marc Grossman has served in a number of interesting countries and positions over the past 29 years. From 1976-1983, at a pivotal point in the Cold War, he was employed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan – America's key regional ally, through which millions of dollars in weapons and other "aid" were delivered by Pakistan's ISI intelligence service to the mujahedin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
At the same time, Pakistan was actively seeking to become a nuclear power following another humiliating military defeat at the hands of India in 1971. This pursuit necessarily involved clandestine, black-market transactions, and it in fact led Pakistan to spawn the world's biggest eventual nuclear proliferator – A.Q. Khan, father of the country's nuclear program and supplier to numerous sketchy regimes and underworld characters. The U.S., as Seymour Hersh recounted in 1993, looked the other way as Pakistan developed nuclear technologies throughout the 1980s: "protecting the Afghanistan war had emerged as a major policy of the State Department's Bureau of Near East and South Asia Affairs, which was responsible for Pakistani policy."
Grossman's professional ties with Pakistan apparently long outlived his nine-year tenure there. The Guardian, among others, mentioned the fact that in the days immediately preceding Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistani ISI chief Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed – financier of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta – paid a visit to senior administration officials, including Grossman, then undersecretary of state for political affairs.
A Pakistani article published on Sept. 10, 2001, claimed that Ahmed's
"most important meeting was with Mark Grossman, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. U.S. sources would not furnish any details beyond saying that the two discussed 'matters of mutual interests.' What those matters could be is a matter of pure conjecture. One can safely guess that the discussions must have centered around Afghanistan, relations with India and China, disarmament of civilian outfits, country's nuclear and missiles program, and, of course, Osama bin Laden."
Following a three-year stint in the private office of NATO Secretary General Lord Carrington in Brussels, Grossman went on to become deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Turkey from 1989-1992. Two years later, he was appointed ambassador, representing U.S. political, commercial, and military interests in Turkey until June 1997. In this position, he would have been well informed of everything in these realms, and worked with leading lobbyists from both America and Turkey, as well as the firms they represented. A comprehensive study shows the staggering scope of American military aid to Turkey during the period in question. This largesse depended and continues to depend on the good offices of influential governmental and near-governmental officials and businessmen.
Examples abound: let's take the other two doubly implicated characters by Sibel Edmonds, Doug Feith and Richard Perle. In 1989, "Feith registered International Advisors Inc. (IAI) as a foreign agent representing the government of Turkey," wrote James Zogby, four months before 9/11. "One of the stated purposes of the work of IAI was to 'promote the objective of U.S.-Turkish defense industrial cooperation.'" In fact, in the ensuing years, the firm – its highest paid "external" consultant being one Richard Perle – was compensated for lobbying services for Turkey at a rate of $600,000 a year. Zogby cites a Wall Street Journal story from the time of IAI's inception stating that Perle "among other things supervised U.S. military assistance to Turkey during his recent seven-year hitch in the Pentagon."
Interestingly enough, at the same time Feith and Perle were greasing Turkish palms and Grossman was presiding over in Ankara, the CIA's Brewster-Jennings network and Valerie Plame were focusing on nuclear proliferation in Turkey. This scrutiny led them to trace private citizens in America as well as lobby groups like the American-Turkish Council – which is precisely where Plame met future husband Joseph Wilson, while "on duty" at a 1997 reception held by then-Turkish ambassador to the U.S. Nuzhet Kandemir.
The FBI also got involved on the domestic front, as the Edmonds case affirms. And there was discussion between successive Turkish and Pakistani governments, during the 1980s and 1990, regarding the idea of making both nuclear-armed Islamic states. At least as far as we know, only the latter has so far succeeded. MORE ON
http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=8137
From start to finish, the Niger deception and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame depended on a relay team of hawkish officials providentially placed throughout various government agencies. These included the CIA, the Pentagon and its Office of Special Plans (now under official investigation by the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General), the State Department, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), performing a handoff of information from the point of origin (the CIA) to the ultimate "commissioners" of the inquiry, the masterminds in the White House and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Considering the frequently attested intra- and interfactional nature of all of these agencies, it is understandable why the highest officials in the land jostled to get their "people" strategically inserted throughout the departments, where they could garner inside information and hinder the objectives of their ostensibly direct employers whenever they conflicted with the goals of their real minders.
Aside from the high-visibility officials involved or presumably involved in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame – Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, etc. – we also have a generous sprinkling of neocons who, while somewhat less well known, have played a crucial role in not only the Plame outing but in policy-crafting and, perhaps, criminal activities as well.
The present study considers four such figures: David Wurmser and Frederick Fleitz, both formerly employed in the State Department office of the Madman with the Handlebar Mustache, John Bolton; Marc Grossman, a longtime State Department official recently turned lobbyist; and Eric Edelman, like Grossman a former ambassador to Turkey, longtime Cheneyite, and current recess appointee to Doug Feith's old position as No. 3 in the Pentagon.
John Bolton's Attack Dogs
While he has always been an outspoken opponent of arms control of all kinds, John Bolton was assigned to precisely that brief by the Bush administration in May 2001. Now his brief has been changed to acting UN ambassador, though he has in the past called for the cessation of the world body. At least he's consistent in his perversity.
On Oct. 27, on the eve of the Libby indictment, Richard Sale reported that according to "several former and serving U.S. intelligence officials," Libby was told of Plame's CIA identity via a phone call that "definitely came from the State Department office of John Bolton, then the arms control chief of the department."
More specifically, says Sale, Bolton assistants David Wurmser and Frederick Fleitz were part of the relay team responsible for leaking Plame's identity to Libby and then to Novak and Miller. "These same sources alleged that Wurmser, as Bolton's special assistant, got his knowledge of Plame's classified identity from a colleague in his office, Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer detailed to Bolton's office from the agency who worked in the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center (WINIPAC)." Gary Leupp's Nigergate timeline of Nov. 9, 2005, gives further details on their involvement.
David Wurmser: A Blowhard Empowered
Bolton's attack dogs come from the very heart of the neocon establishment. It was Wurmser, after all, who largely wrote the now-infamous 1996 policy paper urging an invasion of Iraq for the sake of Israel: "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." Among the signers were Doug Feith and Richard Perle. Another was Wurmser's wife, Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser, director of Middle East studies at the neocon-friendly Hudson Institute.
Out of power but continuing to skulk around the AEI with his neocon comrades, Wurmser handed out yet more free advice in a similar study published in 2000 by neocon Daniel Pipe's Middle East Forum and Ziad Abdelnour's U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon; it "advocated a wider U.S. role in Lebanon":
"The study, 'Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: The U.S. Role?' called for the United States to force Syria from Lebanon and to disarm it of its alleged weapons of mass destruction. It also argued that 'Syrian rule in Lebanon stands in direct opposition to American ideals' and criticized the United States for engaging rather than confronting the regime. Among the documents signers were several soon-to-be Bush administration figures, including Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Michael Rubin, and Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky. Other signers included Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Ledeen, and Frank Gaffney."
When the neocons started feeling their oats with the return to power of a Republican administration later that year, hawks like Wurmser were locked and loaded to put these ideas into practice. With 9/11 came their ultimate opportunity. As Raw Story reports:
"[S]hortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Wurmser was handpicked by Harold Rhode, a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon 'think tank,' and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to head a top secret Pentagon 'cell' whose job was to comb through CIA intelligence documents and find evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States and its neighbors in the Middle East so a case could be made to launch a preemptive military strike. Wurmser largely invented evidence that Iraq had close ties to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden."
Wurmser's two-man "cell" was officially known as the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, and was based in "a windowless, cipher-locked room at the Pentagon." In order to expedite Wurmser's "research," Feith and Rhode had to perform some "softening-up" operations on the professional intelligence community. A Jan. 26, 2004, report from Mother Jones explains their methods like this:
"[A]ccording to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be 'pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with,' says a former analyst. 'They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the f*ck out of there.'
Frederick Fleitz: Dual-Use Technology Personified
For his part, Fleitz was an old confidante of Bolton's and "on loan" to his office from the CIA. A State Department intelligence analyst on WMD, Greg Thielman, told Seymour Hersh in 2003 that Bolton "surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get CIA information directly." Bolton affirmed for Hersh that he had demanded and received "direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous administrations, such data had been made available to undersecretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specific secured offices of the INR [the State Department intelligence branch]."
That Bolton's boys would betray Valerie Plame should come as no surprise, considering their consistently vicious previous tactics with intelligence officers who resisted their orders to make the intelligence fit their case. In April 2005, the New York Times reported on several antagonistic e-mails sent during 2002 by Fleitz to Christian Westermann, "the State Department's top expert on biological weapons," who also worked under Thielman.
Apparently, John Bolton could not tolerate the "wimpy" language that the INR recommended he use in a speech about Cuba. The always bellicose Bolton sought to accuse Cuba of developing biological weapons – a prospect even more fanciful than Iraq's alleged ambitions in the field. In any case, the war of attrition had its effect on Westermann, who on Sept. 23, 2002, wrote a high-ranking INR official, Thomas Fingar, stating that the incessant attacks from Bolton/Fleitz were "affecting my work, my health, and [my] dedication to public service."
Westermann, a career naval officer, was moved in 2000 to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation. In 2005, he testified in a Senate hearing [.pdf] that "Mr. Bolton was very unhappy that a working level analyst [i.e., himself] had the temerity to alter language that he wanted to say." Regarding Fleitz, Westermann revealed that "Fred was a conduit for Mr. Bolton to receive other information [from the CIA] … there were times that material flowed from other agencies to Undersecretary Bolton not through INR." Frank affirmations of Bolton's abusive nature while in the State Department were made at his April 2005 UN confirmation hearings by Carl W. Ford Jr., Westermann's ultimate boss at the INR.
Marc Grossman: A Dark Horse Candidate?
It's clear that Cheney assistant Libby thought to ask John Bolton about the identity of the CIA's "secret envoy" to Niger (i.e., Wilson) because he recognized that the WMD-focused brief of Bolton and Fleitz meant they had a good chance of finding out who was behind Joe Wilson's trip to Africa. They also shared Libby's neocon ideology. In short, they were people he could count on.
But why, then, did Libby also ask a non-WMD specialist like Marc Grossman? How was he in a position to help, and why did Libby believe he could be trusted with the mission?
Although Grossman "has not been as high profile in the press" FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds cryptically told me the other day, "don't overlook him – he is very important."
She was not speaking about the Plame affair, though Grossman did indeed have a key role there, as we will see. According to her, Grossman was one of three officials – the other two, she says, are Richard Perle and Douglas Feith – who had been watched by both Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA team, and by the major FBI investigation of organized crime and governmental corruption on which she herself was working until being terminated in April 2002.
Marc Grossman has served in a number of interesting countries and positions over the past 29 years. From 1976-1983, at a pivotal point in the Cold War, he was employed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan – America's key regional ally, through which millions of dollars in weapons and other "aid" were delivered by Pakistan's ISI intelligence service to the mujahedin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
At the same time, Pakistan was actively seeking to become a nuclear power following another humiliating military defeat at the hands of India in 1971. This pursuit necessarily involved clandestine, black-market transactions, and it in fact led Pakistan to spawn the world's biggest eventual nuclear proliferator – A.Q. Khan, father of the country's nuclear program and supplier to numerous sketchy regimes and underworld characters. The U.S., as Seymour Hersh recounted in 1993, looked the other way as Pakistan developed nuclear technologies throughout the 1980s: "protecting the Afghanistan war had emerged as a major policy of the State Department's Bureau of Near East and South Asia Affairs, which was responsible for Pakistani policy."
Grossman's professional ties with Pakistan apparently long outlived his nine-year tenure there. The Guardian, among others, mentioned the fact that in the days immediately preceding Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistani ISI chief Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed – financier of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta – paid a visit to senior administration officials, including Grossman, then undersecretary of state for political affairs.
A Pakistani article published on Sept. 10, 2001, claimed that Ahmed's
"most important meeting was with Mark Grossman, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. U.S. sources would not furnish any details beyond saying that the two discussed 'matters of mutual interests.' What those matters could be is a matter of pure conjecture. One can safely guess that the discussions must have centered around Afghanistan, relations with India and China, disarmament of civilian outfits, country's nuclear and missiles program, and, of course, Osama bin Laden."
Following a three-year stint in the private office of NATO Secretary General Lord Carrington in Brussels, Grossman went on to become deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Turkey from 1989-1992. Two years later, he was appointed ambassador, representing U.S. political, commercial, and military interests in Turkey until June 1997. In this position, he would have been well informed of everything in these realms, and worked with leading lobbyists from both America and Turkey, as well as the firms they represented. A comprehensive study shows the staggering scope of American military aid to Turkey during the period in question. This largesse depended and continues to depend on the good offices of influential governmental and near-governmental officials and businessmen.
Examples abound: let's take the other two doubly implicated characters by Sibel Edmonds, Doug Feith and Richard Perle. In 1989, "Feith registered International Advisors Inc. (IAI) as a foreign agent representing the government of Turkey," wrote James Zogby, four months before 9/11. "One of the stated purposes of the work of IAI was to 'promote the objective of U.S.-Turkish defense industrial cooperation.'" In fact, in the ensuing years, the firm – its highest paid "external" consultant being one Richard Perle – was compensated for lobbying services for Turkey at a rate of $600,000 a year. Zogby cites a Wall Street Journal story from the time of IAI's inception stating that Perle "among other things supervised U.S. military assistance to Turkey during his recent seven-year hitch in the Pentagon."
Interestingly enough, at the same time Feith and Perle were greasing Turkish palms and Grossman was presiding over in Ankara, the CIA's Brewster-Jennings network and Valerie Plame were focusing on nuclear proliferation in Turkey. This scrutiny led them to trace private citizens in America as well as lobby groups like the American-Turkish Council – which is precisely where Plame met future husband Joseph Wilson, while "on duty" at a 1997 reception held by then-Turkish ambassador to the U.S. Nuzhet Kandemir.
The FBI also got involved on the domestic front, as the Edmonds case affirms. And there was discussion between successive Turkish and Pakistani governments, during the 1980s and 1990, regarding the idea of making both nuclear-armed Islamic states. At least as far as we know, only the latter has so far succeeded. MORE ON
http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=8137
posted by professor rat at 1:36 AM
<< Home