James Woolsey

Appointed to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board after Donald Rumsfeld became defense secretary, Woolsey is vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a high-powered consulting firm and military contractor based in Virginia. He also serves as the honorary co-chair, along with Sen. Jon Kyl, of the hardline Center for Security Policy; is a member of the recently revived Cold War-era anticommunist group the Committee on the Present Danger; is a distinguished adviser for the neoconservative-led Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; serves on the advisory board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, described by one observer as "a think tank that puts Israel and its security at the heart of U.S. foreign policy" (Sunday Herald, April 13, 2003); and supported the advocacy work of two letterhead groups that played influential roles generating support for invading Iraq and fighting an expansive war on terror in the wake of 9/11, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

Woolsey's multiple connections in both government and the private sector have often been criticized by observers and watchdog groups. In a March 2003 report about the potential conflicts of interest of several members of the Defense Policy Board, the Center for Public Integrity highlighted Woolsey as a case in point: "Former CIA Director James Woolsey is a principal in the Paladin Capital Group, a venture-capital firm that, like [Richard] Perle's Trireme Partners, is soliciting investment for homeland security firms. Woolsey joined consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton as vice president in July 2002. The company had contracts worth more than $680 million in 2002. Woolsey told the Wall Street Journal that he does no lobbying and that none of the companies he has ties to have been discussed during a Defense Policy Board meeting."

Woolsey's government service dates back to the early 1970s, when he served as an adviser to the U.S. Delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. He also helped lead talks on a number of other arms control negotiations, including the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks and the Nuclear and Space Arms Talks (see Center for Strategic and International Studies, Biography of R. James Woolsey).

In the early 1980s, Woolsey became acquainted with a number of high-powered figures, including Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, with whom he would later team up on numerous occasions over the next three decades to support controversial defense and security polices. Although a conservative Democrat, Woolsey served—with Cheney and Rumsfeld—as a team leader for secretive doomsday scenario exercises organized by the Reagan administration as part of a continuity of government program aimed at ensuring the survival of the U.S. government in the event of a nuclear war (Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 140, 335).

After a brief, unhappy tenure as director of the CIA during Clinton's first term, Woolsey joined the law firm of Shea & Gardner, which serves a number of major corporate clients, including the defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin and which counts among its former employers Stephen Hadley, who was appointed national security adviser during George W. Bush's second term.

During this period and continuing into the Bush administration, Woolsey continued to serve as a government consultant and adviser. Prior to his appointment to the Defense Policy Board, he served on the controversial Donald Rumsfeld-chaired Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat, whose final report, issued in 1998, argued that several "rogue" countries would be able to target the United States with ballistic missiles in a few short years. Other members of the congressionally mandated commission included William Schneider Jr., Stephen Cambone, and Paul Wolfowitz.

Woolsey again teamed up with the usual suspects in 2001 as a participant in a study group that produced "Rationale and Requirements for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control," a report published by the hawkish National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP). According to the World Policy Institute, the NIPP study served as a blueprint for George W. Bush's Nuclear Posture Review. Among the study participants were several current and former Bush administration officials, including Cambone, Hadley, Robert Joseph, and Keith Payne (NIPP's director).

Woolsey, along with several other NIPP study participants—including Payne—moved directly from the NIPP study into the Pentagon's Deterrence Concepts Advisory Panel, which was tasked with implementing George W. Bush's Nuclear Posture Review.

Even before 9/11 Woolsey was an outspoken proponent of invading Iraq. A founding member of PNAC, the influential neoconservative-led letterhead group founded in the late 1990s by William Kristol and Robert Kagan to champion a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity," Woolsey signed—along with the likes of Perle, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz—a number of PNAC's open letters to government figures aimed at pressing an aggressive overseas military agenda. One such letter was PNAC's 1998 missive to Clinton, which served as an opening salvo of the neoconservative advocacy effort to support a U.S. invasion of Iraq. The letter argued that deterring Saddam Hussein had failed and that the "only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power."

Woolsey was among the first government advisers to call for ousting Hussein after 9/11. Immediately after the attacks, Woolsey joined Wolfowitz and Perle in pressing for an expanded war on terror that would include removing Hussein from power. According to the Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows, "The very next day, September 12, 2001, James Woolsey, who had been Clinton's first CIA director, told me that no matter who proved to be responsible for this attack, the solution had to include removing Saddam Hussein, because he was so likely to be involved next time."

Woolsey quickly turned into a prominent media presence after 9/11, issuing broadsides on right-wing outlets like FoxNews against opponents of the Bush administration's war on terror and characterizing the conflict in stark, existential terms. Regarding European and Arab reluctance to support an expansion of the war on terror to Iraq, Woolsey argued that "only fear will reestablish [Arab] respect for us ... we need a little bit of Machiavelli ... We really don't need the Europeans. Anyways, they will be the first in line patting us on the back following our success and saying they were with us all along'' (quoted in the Sunday Herald, April 13, 2003).

In late 2002, Woolsey gave a widely quoted speech at the Restoration Weekend convention, an annual conference of high-profile conservative figures, during which he argued that the United States was fighting World War IV, a term that had earlier been promoted by the likes of Norman Podhoretz, a central figure in the neoconservative faction, and Eliot Cohen, a Woolsey colleague on the Defense Policy Board and professor at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies who was an important academic supporter of the Bush administration's response to 9/11. Said Woolsey: "Let me say a few words about who our enemy is in this World War IV, why they're at war with us and (now) we with them, and how we have to think about fighting it both at home and abroad. First of all, who are they? Well, there are at least three, but I would say principally three movements, of a sort, all coming out of the Middle East. And the interesting thing is that they've been at war with us for years. The Islamist Shia, the ruling circles, the ruling Clerics, the Mullahs of Iran, minority—definite minority of the Iranian Shiite Clerics, but those who constitute the ruling force in Iran and sponsor and back Hezbollah, have been at war with us for nearly a quarter of a century. They seized our hostages in 1979 in Tehran. They blew up our embassy and our marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. They've conducted a wide range of terrorist acts against the United States for something now close to a quarter of a century. The second group is the fascists, and I don't use that as an expletive. The Baathist parties of Iraq and really Syria as well, are essentially fascist parties or modeled after the fascist parties of the '30s. They're totalitarian, they're anti-Semitic, they're fascist ... The third group, and the one that caused us finally to notice, is the Islamist Sunni. And this is the most, in some ways, I think virulent and long-term portion of these three groupings that are at war with us, and will be at war, I think, for a long time."

Woolsey added: "This is going to be a long war, very long indeed. I hope not as long as the Cold War, 40 plus years, but certainly longer than either World War I or World War II. I rather imagine it's going to be measured, I'm afraid, in decades."

Woolsey repeated the main items of this speech during another conference held at UCLA that was organized by campus Republicans and Americans for Victory over Terrorism, a letterhead group sponsored by the right-wing Claremont Institute and for which Woolsey once served as a senior adviser (The Nation, April 4, 2003).

Commenting on the World War IV rhetoric in vogue among neoconservatives, the conservative scholars Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke wrote in their 2004 book America Alone: "Clearly, [such rhetoric] grabs headlines and, in its evocation of the Trotskyite notion of permanent revolution, keeps us alert. But is this, in fact, the most useful way of looking at the global problems facing the United States? As Americans ponder the ways in which they can promote American interests and values ... we wonder ... whether the best image the world can have of America is engagement in warfare 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year" (pp. 29-30).

Woolsey has also been a proponent of expanding government powers to wage the war on terror. In February 2006, Woolsey supported the controversial phone-taping program of the National Security Agency in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said: "Unlike the Cold War, domestic terrorism in this country cannot solely be dealt with by criminal law. It is difficult to understand how one deters through criminal law individuals who want to die themselves while killing thousands of others. Unlike the Cold War, security can come more into conflict with liberty than we wish would be the case."

More recently, Woolsey seems to have adopted contrasting attitudes toward World War IV. At the same time that he has vociferously hawked threats from Iran and Syria, Woolsey has also joined a host of neoconservatives—including Ken Adelman and Perle—in expressing a profound pessimism over the direction of the Iraq War.

In November 2006, Woolsey was the keynote speaker at a conference sponsored by the hawkish American Foreign Policy Council titled "Understanding the Iranian Threat." He told the audience: "First of all, the Persians invented chess, and they are very good at it," he began, calling Iran's nuclear program a "queen" that it was protecting using various other "lesser pieces," such as Syria, Moqtada al-Sadr, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Woolsey went on to suggest that North Korea might ship Iran plutonium or highly enriched uranium in diplomatic pouches for weapons-making purposes. Other speakers at the conference included Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Walid Phares of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

In a widely noted January 2007 article published by Vanity Fair, Woolsey added his voice to the growing chorus of former Iraq War supporters among the neoconservatives in arguing that the conflict was spinning out of control and hinting that it could turn out to be a tremendous foreign policy blunder. Drawing parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, Woolsey argued that if the war ends in a U.S. defeat, the consequences will be "awful, awful ... It will convince the jihadis and al-Qaida-in-Iraq types as well as the residual Baathists that we are a paper tiger, and they or anybody they want to help can take us on anywhere and anytime they want and be effective, that we don't have the stomach to stay and fight."

Government Service

Private Sector

Education

Booz Allen Hamilton, Press Release, "R. James Woolsey Joins Booz Allen as Vice President," July 15, 2002.

Center for Strategic and International Studies: Biography of R. James Woolsey (Web Archive), http://web.archive.org/web/20010802110853/http://www.csis.org/html/4woolsey.htm.

James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Viking, 2004).

William D. Hartung with Jonathan Reingold, "About Face: The Role of the Arms Lobby in the Bush Administration's Radical Reversal of Two Decades of U.S. Nuclear Policy," World Policy Institute, Arms Trade Resource Center, May 2002, http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/reportaboutface.html.

James Fallows, "Blind into Baghdad," Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2004.

Neil MacKay, "Carving Up the New Iraq," Sunday Herald, April 15, 2003.

James Woolsey, "World War IV," speech at Restoration Weekend, November 16, 2002, reprinted in FrontPageMagazine.com, November 22, 2002.

"The Pentagon's (CIA) Man in Iraq," The Nation Blog, April 4, 2003.

Testimony of James Woolsey, Hearing of The Senate Judiciary Committee, "Wartime Executive Power and The NSA's Surveillance Authority," February 28, 2006.

Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

James Woolsey, Keynote Address at Conference on "Understanding the Iranian Threat," American Foreign Policy Council, November 15, 2006.

David Rose, "Neo Culpa," Vanity Fair, January 2007.

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