Abram Shulsky

> Director, Pentagon's Office of Special Plans

> Project for the New American Century: Study member

Institutional Affiliations

Government Service

Education

Highlights & Quotes

Abram Shulsky, a Leo Strauss scholar and intelligence expert associated with the Project for the New American Century, is best known for his work in the Office of Special Plans, a secretive intelligence outfit in the Pentagon that was charged with digging up information on Iraq that would support the administration's arguments for going to war. According to an expose by the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the Office of Special Plans, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz and began its work soon after the 9/11 terrorists attacks, "has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts . . . have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi." (1)

By late 2002, says Hersh, the Office of Special Plans had overshadowed the C.I.A. and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., and become Bush's main intelligence source on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and on Hussein's alleged Al Qaeda connections. Hersh continues, "Although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question. The director of the Special Plans operation is Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Shulsky has been quietly working on intelligence and foreign-policy issues for three decades; he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early nineteen-eighties and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration, after which he joined the Rand Corporation. The Office of Special Plans is overseen by Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti, a retired Navy captain. Luti was an early advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the Administration moved toward war and policymaking power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities." (1)

W. Patrick Lang, a former Middle East expert at the DIA, told Hersh, "The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government's foreign policy, and they've pulled it off. They're running Chalabi. The DIA has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there's no guts at all in the CIA." (1)

Shulsky arrived at the Office of Special Plans armed with his own unique perspective on the value and purpose of intelligence. In 2002, Shulsky coauthored with Gary Schmitt, the director of the Project for the New American Century, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, which argued that "truth is not the goal" of intelligence operations, but "victory." (5)

The two also coauthored The Future of U.S. Intelligence, a report published by the hardline National Security Information Center that foreshadowed the work of the Office of Special Plans. The report concluded that intelligence should not be centralized in the CIA, and that the intelligence community should adopt new methodology aimed at "obtaining information others try to keep secret and penetrating below the 'surface' impression created by publicly available information to determine whether an adversary is deceiving us or denying us key information." It recommended creating "competing analytic centers" with "different points of view" that could "provide policymakers better protection against new 'Pearl Harbors,' i.e., against being surprised." (6)

(1) Seymour Hersh, "Selective Intelligence," New Yorker, May 5, 2003
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/052803H.shtml

(2) Media Transparency
http://www.mediatransparency.org/search_results/comment_string_search_results.php?Message=Shulsky

(3) Project for the New American Century: Search: Shulsky
http://search.freefind.com/find.html?id=2557452&pid=r&mode=ALL&query=shulsky&SUBMIT=Find%21&t=s

(4) GroupWatch: National Strategy Information Center
http://www.irc-online.org/research/Group_Watch/Entries-99.htm

(5) Abram N. Shulsky and Gary J. Schmitt, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence (Dulles, VA: Brassey's Inc., 2002), p. 176

(6) Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, The Future of U.S. Intelligence: Report Prepared for the Working Group on Intelligence Reform (Washington: Consortium for the Study of Intelligence of the National Security Information Center, 1996)