Over the past few years, Fred Fleitz, a career CIA officer who served as John Bolton's chief of staff at the State Department during George W. Bush's first presidential term, has repeatedly bubbled to the surface in the blogosphere rumor mill. He has been linked to a number of scandals that have wracked the Bush administration, including the so-called Plamegate affair and efforts by partisans in government to silence opponents. In August 2006 Fleitz, who has also served as a staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, was identified in press accounts as the author of a controversial House report that alleged that Iran's nuclear program could be much more advanced than intelligence agencies believe.
Perhaps due to his background at the CIA, comprehensive information about Fleitz's career is difficult to track down. During April 2005 hearings before the S enate Foreign Relations Committee on Bolton's nomination to be UN ambassador, Fleitz testified: "I'm a CI [counterintelligence] officer on detail to John Bolton's staff as a special assistant, I've been on detail since August 2001. I've been a CI officer for 19 years, and I came the, a CI WINPAC [sic], the Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center. I've done some work in WMD, most of my work has been on international organizations ." When a committee counselor asked why he had been sent from the CIA to the State Department, Fleitz replied: ". In early 2000, 2001, Mr. Bolton asked that I be detailed, since he had worked with me during the first Bush administration; I also handled UN issues when he was the assistant secretary of state for international organizations, and he had asked that I be sent to him."
Describing his job responsibilities, Fleitz said: "I'm the acting Chief of Staff for the T front office [the Under Secretary's Office, which oversees four Assistant Secretaries], and I also have responsibilities with WINPAC, and I perform liaison function for the Agency and Mr. Bolton" (U.S. Senate Hearing, April 11, 2005).
Before Richard Armitage finally owned up in September 2006 to leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame's name, Fleitz was a prime suspect in the eyes of many armchair analysts, who seized on Fleitz's connection to WINPAC in speculating as to possible sources for the leak, which sparked a federal investigation that resulted in the indictment of former Bush administration official I. Lewis Libby. Because Plame also works for WINPAC, bloggers surmised that Fleitz might have been in a position to identify her to his superiors in the administration. Laura Rozen wrote in her War and Piece blog: ". It's worth remembering, wasn't Bolton's acting chief of staff Frederick Fleitz wearing a second hat when he was working for Bolton? That hat was . wait . an analyst with the CIA's WINPAC bureau. The precise bureau Libby told [Judith] Miller that Joe Wilson's wife worked for, Miller writes. Maybe Fleitz or Bolton supplied the name of Wilson's wife after Libby had pushed Miller to dig in that direction? ." (October 16, 2005).
Fleitz has also been tied to numerous efforts by Bolton to silence critics in the administration regarding the direction of U.S. foreign policy. During Bolton's spring 2005 nomination hearing, Alan Foley, who headed CIA's weapons intelligence office, testified that in 2002 Fleitz told him about Bolton's disappointment with an analyst who contested Bolton's contention that Cuba was vigorously trying to develop weapons of mass destruction. Foley told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "What I remember is Fred said something in the conversation, like, 'John thinks this guy ought to be fired.' And I remember being jarred by that" (AP, May 4, 2005).
Fleitz was also reportedly involved in efforts to sideline the work of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (or INR), which was one of the few intel outfits that seriously questioned the justifications used by the Bush administration for advocating war in Iraq [for more on the INR, see Right Web Profile: Randall Fort]. Citing declassified emails, Reuters reported that Fleitz "threatened to diminish the role of the State Department's intelligence bureau because of a dispute over analyzing China's missile export controls" (Reuters, May 10, 2005).
Some observers have argued that all the attention Fleitz has received from blogs misses the point. Steve Clemons opined in his The Washington Note blog: "Fred Fleitz, an interesting and provocative CIA official who was loaned to Bolton, was not operating in his own right. Fleitz was not [a] renegade himself. He was following instructions of Bolton, operating on behalf of Bolton, in a manner consistent with the expectations-and apparently the behavior paradigm-of John Bolton" (TheWashingtonNote.com, May 10, 2005).
On the other hand, Fleitz's consistent involvement in hardline initiatives in government seems to point to a clear trend. The most recent example came in mid-2006, when Fleitz, who by then had taken a post as a staff member of the House Intelligence Committee, served as the principal author of a committee report, "Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat," which criticized the intelligence community for not providing more evidence of the threatening nature of Iran's nuclear program (Washington Post, August 24, 2006).
As journalist Jim Lobe has reported: "The fact that Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA officer, was apparently the report's main author . suggests that his effort to undermine confidence in the intelligence community's estimates regarding Iran is part of a larger campaign that includes many of the same hawks who led the drive to war in Iraq. In addition to working for Hoekstra, a staunch administration loyalist, Fleitz served as John Bolton's special assistant during Bush's first term. Bolton, then undersecretary of state for international security and arms control, worked particularly closely with neoconservatives in Cheney's office and the Pentagon to undermine efforts by his nominal boss at the time, Secretary of State Colin Powell, to engage Iran, North Korea, and Syria on a range of issues" (see Jim Lobe, "An Intel Air Ball," Right Web, August 29, 2006).
Fleitz is the author of the 2002 book Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s: Causes, Solutions, and U.S. Interests. Blurbed by Jeane Kirkpatrick on its jacket as a "splendid analysis of peacekeeping in the 90s [that] illuminates the problems encountered by the United States in its effort to utilize the new tool . to achieve military goals," the book argues that peacekeeping operations can only work in a limited number of situations. Citing a number of peacekeeping "fiascoes" during the last decade, including in Somalia and Sierra Leone, Fleitz argues that there is only one "legitimate" type of peacekeeping operation: "traditional" peacekeeping, which he defines as "unarmed or lightly armed multilateral troops deployed with the consent of state-party disputants. They are impartial and use force only in self-defense. Traditional peacekeeping forces sometimes are permissible to help end civil wars if verifiable cease-fires and the full consent of disputants can be obtained" (p. 3).
According to his biography on the book's jacket, Fleitz is the former president of the board of directors of the National Collegiate Conference Association, a non-governmental organization that oversees the National Model United Nations program.
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Affiliations
National Collegiate Conference Association: Former President, Board of Directors
Government Service
CIA: Analyst at the Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: Staff Member (2006)
State Department: Former Chief of Staff to Undersecretary John Bolton
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