Ayoon wa Azan (Biographies Of The Neo-Cons: Richard Perle)

Jihad Al Khazen     Al-Hayat     2003/06/14

A member of JINSA's board of advisers. Richard Perle, whose nickname is the Prince of Darkness, is probably the most high profile and brazen of the neo-conservatives. Perle is a frequent commentator on TV and in the press, and is himself often the subject of unfavorable reporting.

Perle's deep commitment to Israel and his readiness to work within the U.S. political establishment in Israel's interests have been apparent over the past three decades. At the same time he has a marked tendency to mix his political and business activities in questionable ways, and such activities led to his quitting the chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board in March 2003.

Perle has for years expertly maneuvered his way in and out of the highest levels of government. He has great influence with the administration through his close contact with senior administration hawks - Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith and the State Department's Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton. Some call this group of contacts "the string of Perles."

Perle used his platform as the chairman of the quasi-official Defense Policy Board to argue that a full-scale pre-emptive strike against Iraq must be the next move in the post September 11 war on terrorism. He has also been very hostile to the UN, as an unnecessary encumbrance to U.S. unilateralism, and wrote a newspaper article entitled 'Thank God for the Death of the UN.'

Perle was born in New York in 1941 and has a BA from the University of Southern California and an MA in political science from Princeton University. He was in the 1970s a staffer for Democrat Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson, one of the most anti-communist and pro-Israeli members of the Senate.

Perle was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy from 1981 to 1987, and he opposed arms-control agreements with the Soviets. He was chairman of the Defense Policy Board from July 2001, until he was forced to resign in He remains a member of the Board.

Perle is a member of many of the neo-conservative think tanks and of the various neo-conservative initiatives in recent years. He is a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He was an adviser to the lobbying firm run by Douglas Feith, now the Pentagon's Under Secretary of Defense.

He worked as an aide to former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and was an author of the 1996 report 'A Clean Break' prepared for Netanyahu, which has proved to outline with uncanny prescience the way things have developed - or from the Arab point of view deteriorated - in the Middle East since then. Perle is an advisor to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, set up after 11 September to focus on the war on terrorism.

In his business life, he was adviser to International Advisors Incorporated in 1989-1994, director of the Autonomy Corporation, managing partner of Trireme Partners LP, and adviser to Global Crossing Ltd. He is a director of the Jerusalem Post and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Conrad Black's Hollinger Digital Inc. He was a producer of PBS The Gulf Crisis: The Road to War 1992

In his introduction to David Wormser's book Tyranny's Ally - America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, published in 1999, Perle said the book was important not only for investigating the policy into Iraq, but on a broader level for opening a debate about the premises and quality of Middle Eastern policy makers and scholars.

Perle said there had been two wrong assumptions; one that toleration of tyranny rather than support for freedom best secures stability, and the other is that a strong and resolute America would be regarded in the Middle East as provocative and insensitive. Such ideas have led the U.S. to failure.

Perle's own books include Reshaping Western Security published 1991, and was paid $300,000 by Random House to write Hard Line (1992) about his time in the Reagan Administration.

Perle accepted an offer from Donald Rumsfeld in mid-2001 to chair the Defense Policy Board and under his chairmanship it has become increasingly powerful. At the same time his chairmanship has attracted unwelcome publicity. In July 2002 Perle invited Rand Corp analyst Laurent Murawiec, a former follower of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche, to address the Board on Saudi Arabia. The briefing was reported by the Washington Post on its front page on 6 August. Murawiec claimed Saudi Arabia was active at every level of the terror chain "from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-solider, from ideologist to cheerleader."

Murawiec recommended that the U.S. target Saudi Arabia's oil, financial holdings and even its holy places unless it stamped out anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli writings, stopped funding fundamentalist mosques and prosecuted or isolated "those involved in the terror chain, including in the Saudi intelligence services."

Secretary of State Colin Powell told Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal the briefing had no bearing on U.S. policy. Donald Rumsfeld also distanced himself from the presentation, while Perle told Time magazine he hadn't known what Murawiec was going to say in advance.

As a member of the Defense Policy Board Perle is a federal government employee and he should not use his position to benefit himself financially. Perle resigned as chairman on 27 March after publication in the media of reports on two matters. The first was that he had been employed as a consultant by bankrupt telecommunications firm Global Crossing Ltd, which was trying to get Pentagon clearance to be sold to Asian investors. Perle had an arrangement with Global Crossing to get $600,000 on top of his retainer of $125,000 if the Pentagon and other government agencies approved its sale. The second was that he had been seeking investments from a Saudi who was seeking to influence U.S. policy on Iraq.

In his letter of resignation, Perle told Rumsfeld he was resigning because "I have seen controversies like this before and I know that this one will inevitably distract from the urgent challenge in which you are now engaged."

Details of Perle's dealings with two Saudi businessmen were given by Seymour Hersh in an article published in March 2003 in The New Yorker. Hersh wrote that there had been a private lunch in Marseilles on 3 January attended by Perle and Iraq-born Saudi industrialist Harb Saleh Al Zuheir, arranged by Adnan Khashoggi. Perle is a managing partner in the venture-capital company Trireme Partners, whose main business is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods and services that are of value to homeland security and Defense.

Two other Defense Policy Board members, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Gerald Hillman are also associated with Trireme. Hersh said it wanted to attract more investors such as Khashoggi and Al Zuheir.

Khashoggi and Al Zuheir told Hersh that they understood one of Trireme's objectives was to seek the help of influential Saudis to win homeland security contract with the Saudi royal family. Khashoggi told Hersh that he was the intermediary. Al Zuheir was keen to discuss the situation over Iraq with Perle, in order to see if war could be avoided. The two Saudis said the lunch had two purposes. Al Zuheir wanted the chance to propose a peaceful alternative to war. The second was to pave the way for Al Zuheir to assemble a group of ten Saudi businessmen to invest $10 million each in Trireme. Perle stuck to the line that Saddam must be got rid of.

Perle acknowledged he had met two Saudis at the lunch but denied there was any discussion of Trireme or indeed any money matters. He stated the lunch was not about money. Hersh says when Perle's lunch with the two Saudis and his connection with Trireme became known to a few ranking members of the Saudi royal family they reacted with anger and astonishment. Perle has often expressed anti-Saudi views in public, with sentiments such as "the Saudis are a major source of the problem we face with terrorism."

Perle declared he would sue Hersh, in London rather than in the USA. He obviously thought he would stand a greater chance of winning in London.

There was a further outcry about Perle's business dealings when the Los Angeles Times revealed on 7 May 2003 that in February the Defense Policy Board received a classified presentation from the super-secret Defense Intelligence Agency on the crises in North Korea and Iraq. Three weeks later Perle, who was still chairman of the Defense Policy Board, offered a briefing of his own at a Goldman Sachs investment seminar on ways to profit from possible conflicts in both countries.

Perle and his fellow advisers on the Board also heard a classified address about high-tech military communications systems at the same closed-door session in February. Perle runs a venture capital firm that has been exploring investments in that very area.

"The disclosures in recently released board agendas and investment documents are the latest illustrations of how Perle's private consulting and investment interests overlap with his role on the board, which advises the secretary of Defense," the Los Angeles Times commented. It quoted Retired Rear Admiral Thomas Brooks, who served on the Board during the Clinton administration, as saying Perle's actions were certainly "questionable" and that "it sounds like he's squeezing every nickel out of the Defense Policy Board."

The question marks over Perle go very far back, as is shown by the book The Armageddon Network by Michael Saba (Amana 1984) in which he is a central character. At the time Perle was Assistant Secretary of Defense and Stephen Bryen was his deputy, the two were part of a network of individuals working in Israeli's interests. Both were seen as hawks in a hawkish administration.

Before that, when Perle was working as the most active staffer of Democratic Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson he already had a reputation as someone who leaked sensitive information. Perle was leaked a top-secret document by a CIA analyst on Soviet missile strength, which he passed to Jackson. CIA director Stansfield Turner fired the CIA agent and told Jackson he should fire Perle, but Perle and Jackson merely apologized to Turner. Perle was also caught out, through wiretapping, discussing classified information with the Israeli Embassy. The incidents started in 1978. Perle called for increased military spending, was an ardent supporter of Israel, hard-line against the Soviets.

By 1983 Perle had appointed Bryen as his deputy. Their brief was not the Middle East, but in practice Perle continued to involve himself in Middle Eastern affairs. Perle also opposed the Kuwait takeover of Santa Fe International Corp. the oil drilling equipment company. Perle opposed it on grounds of national security.

In April 1983 the New York Times published a front page saying that Perle, the Assistant Secretary of Defense, had recommended that the U.S. Army consider buying weapons from an Israeli company a year after he accepted a $50,000 consultancy fee from the company's owners. He got the fee the same month he entered government in 1981. Before publication Perle made every effort through influential friends and so on to get the story pulled from the New York Times. Other newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe condemned Perle's actions.

As Michael Saba wrote in The Armageddon Network, "Richard Perle proved he could make his military expertise and allegiance to Israel pay handsomely."

Perle's wife Leslie Barr shared his views. In October 1981 she was appointed to a high-level position in the Department of Commerce and in late 1981 and early 1982 she helped to develop a Reagan Administration plan to force U.S. oil companies to stop operations in Libya. She claimed Libyan oil imports were a risk to U.S. national security.

Saba found a clear alliance between Perle, Bryen and between their policies and an array of people inside and outside government. Perle and Bryen had technology transfer as part of their brief at the Pentagon. Perle fought for much tougher controls, and this was to Israel's benefit. As Israel, which wanted to develop its high technology exports, could export what the U.S. was not allowed to.

Perle's mentor Albert Wohlstetter, who played an important role in drawing up the Pentagon's strategic and nuclear blueprints during the Cold War, cherished the idea of a Turkey-U.S.-Israel axis. When Perle was in the Defense Department in the Reagan years, he fostered relations with Turkey, and it was he who in 1986 reached the agreement for a five-year Defense and Economic Cooperation Agreement with Turkey. In the late 1980s Perle started lobbying on behalf of Turkey, obtaining $231,000 for these activities between 1990 and 1994.