Janine Wedel - Shadow Elite - How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

A running example of the conduct of Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith—their run-ins with government authorities over several decades, propensity to skirt bureaucracy and breach regulation, and skill in bailing each other out—provides a few of the clues to the reasons for their success.

In 1973 Richard Perle, then in his early thirties and a senior staff member to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat and cold warrior from Washington state and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, helped Wolfowitz, then an assistant professor at Yale, find employment in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). Five years later, Wolfowitz was investigated for passing a classified document to an Israeli government official through a go-between, according to Stephen Green and other sources. Green is a retired journalist who has written for two decades about Israeli espionage in the United States, and in recent years has been interviewed multiple times by the FBI about long-ago activities of these and other members of the Neocon core. 1

NEOCON CORE

Mutual Protection of Three Key Players Over Time

ACDA -- Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

DPBAC -- Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee

Also in 1978, still working with the Senate Armed Services Committee, Perle was caught in a security breach by CIA director Stansfield Turner, who urged that Senator Jackson fire him. Perle received a reprimand but was kept on staff, according to the Washington Post . In another instance, Perle was questioned by the FBI after a wiretap picked him up talking with an Israeli Embassy official about classified information (which he said he obtained from a National Security Council staff member). 2

In 1982, as an assistant secretary for international security policy in President Reagan’s defense department, Perle hired and later promoted Douglas Feith, who had come into the Jackson fold in 1975 when Perle enlisted Feith as an intern (he was Perle and Wolfowitz’s junior by at least a decade). Perle promoted Feith after Feith had been fired from his post as a Middle East analyst at the National Security Council. Feith was fired, Stephen Green found, because he was the subject of an FBI inquiry into whether he had supplied classified material to an Israeli embassy official. 3

After leaving the Pentagon in 1987, Perle became a highly paid consultant for a lobbying firm, International Advisers, Inc., that Feith established in 1989. By serving as a consultant only, Perle—who had supervised U.S. military assistance to Turkey while at Defense—was able to bypass federal regulations prohibiting anyone from representing a foreign government right after leaving American government employment. 4

The mutual assistance among these three men continued into the new millennium. In 2001, Perle and Wolfowitz championed Feith for the position of undersecretary for policy in the Pentagon. In that post, Feith in turn selected Perle as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. (Perle resigned as chairman in March 2003, amid allegations of conflict of interest, and from the board altogether a year later.) 5

Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith have been under frequent investigation for alleged misuse of classified information for a quarter century. Stephen Green told me: “I was asked extraordinarily detailed questions about Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen” and other members of the core group. 6Ledeen is a Neocon core member long associated with those three.

For several decades, members of the Neocon core have honed their modus operandi as radicals in the vanguard: They have socially engineered into action their disdain for bureaucracy, distrust of official information, and disregard for government (and professional) expertise and rules—working from inside and out during presidential administrations from Gerald Ford to George W. Bush. They have done so to achieve their own higher goals. And although their foreign policy endeavors have not always met with success, the success they have enjoyed is because they practice what they preach: It is largely thanks to their skills at, say, personalizing policymaking and governing processes, marginalizing the role of bureaucratic procedures in them, and creating their own bodies of expertise and information to substitute for or override those of government. Thus members of the Neocon core have been agents of some of the systemic changes abetted by the four transformational developments—such as waning loyalty to bureaucratic and professional authority—and, through their activities, have helped some of them gain ground in the United States. And although these changes often nudge policy and governmental decisions further behind the scenes, they enjoy broad approval as forward-looking innovations, and are even embraced by reformers whose politics and ideologies could hardly be more different (and who see the Neocon players as bad guys). 7

Let me walk you through highlights of the Neocon core’s journey, its members’ heartfelt causes and policy aims, and the ways and means they have honed to see them adopted.

Building the Neocon Core

To date, interest in and research on neoconservatives has been focused primarily on their history and thinking, or on their actions as onetime incidents of history. I set for myself the different task of describing the modus operandi of the tiny activist subset centered around Richard Perle. 8

This “Neocon core” must not be confused with the much larger and far more amorphous array of leaders and followers of neoconservative philosophy. But it is crucial to understand the social and intellectual context in which this set of committed adherents arose. The roots of neoconservatism lie in 1930s New York with a small group of intellectuals of mostly east European background—Trotskyists who disagreed with the course of Soviet communism and later rejected socialist ideology completely. They spurned social liberalism, became passionately anticommunist in the 1950s, and disdained the 1960s counterculture. The movement’s founding fathers include Irving Kristol, managing editor (from 1947 to 1952) of Commentary , the movement’s flagship magazine, and Norman Podhoretz, editor in chief of the publication for thirty-five years (1960 to 1995) and now editor at large. Neoconservatism first arrived as a force on the American political scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 9

While neoconservatives and neoconservative thought have been concerned with both domestic and foreign policy, the Neocon core, with Perle at the center, has devoted itself to foreign policy. Members of the core have been interlinked, some for more than three decades, through government, think-tank, business, and advocacy roles, as well as family ties. Journalist Jacob Heil-brunn writes in his book about neoconservative ideology and experience that “neoconservatism was turned into an actual movement by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Even today, the neoconservative movement is best described as an extended family based largely on the informal social networks patiently forged by these two patriarchs.” But the Neocon core did not arise full blown. How did members of this subset begin to team up? 10

Connections made by them date back to the late 1960s. A key to many of the core’s connections was Albert Wohlstetter, a major source of inspiration and a catalytic force for Perle and Wolfowitz. A mathematical logician by training, Wohlstetter held positions at the University of California and the University of Chicago, and became an influential defense strategist at RAND, the think tank that took its name from “research and development.” Wohlstetter posited, as Jacob Heilbrunn outlines, “that there was no real distinction between defense and offense. He set up the doctrinal basis for justifying preventive war. The begetter of much neoconservative defense thought, Wohlstetter had a profound impact as a military theorist. 11