James Woolsey

R. James Woolsey, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1995, was a vocal proponent of the neoconservative-inspired notion that the “war or terror” was World War IV and has aligned himself with a new coalition seeking to break U.S. oil dependence. Woolsey is a self-described "Scoop Jackson/Joe Lieberman Democrat" 1 who, despite his party affiliation, has advised a number of Republican Party figures, including President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain. Woolsey’s diverse resume includes membership in several militarist and neoconservative advocacy organizations, appointments to a number of government posts since the 1970s, and advising military contractors and energy companies. Woolsey has been an influential and unrepentant voice in the U.S. media championing interventionist U.S. foreign policies, especially in the Middle East. In a mid-2008 interview, he said, “I'd support [Saddam Hussein’s] ouster again if there weren't a drop of oil in Iraq. If all that had been at issue was the oil, the simple thing to do would have been to just buy it." 2

Journalist Laura Rozen reports that, “An independent streak has run throughout Woolsey's 40-plus years in Washington. He has served in four administrations, both Republican and Democratic. In the twilight of the Cold War, he found himself increasingly identifying with Republicans on national security. He spent three years as a member of then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board. When I met with him [in early 2008], he was expecting another career change, leaving the federal contractor Booz Allen Hamilton to join a California firm that invests in alternative-energy technology. He'd also just appeared in an anti-oil print ad for the American Clean Skies Foundation, a PR group started by a natural gas company.” 3

During the first administration of President George W. Bush, Woolsey was appointed to official panels that advised Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, including the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee (DPB), chaired by Richard Perle at the time of Woolsey’s appointment, 4 as well as the Deterrence Concepts Advisory Panel. 5

During Clinton’s second term, Woolsey served on the controversial Rumsfeld-chaired Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat, whose final 1998 report issued the alarmist conclusion 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. 6

Woolsey also participated in a nongovernmental study group that produced the 2001 report "Rationale and Requirements for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control," which was published by the hawkish National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP). According to the progressive-leaning World Policy Institute, the NIPP study served as a blueprint for George W. Bush's Nuclear Posture Review, a comprehensive review of U.S. nuclear weapons policies. Among the study participants were Cambone, Hadley, Robert Joseph, and Keith Payne (NIPP's director). 7 Woolsey, along with several other study participants—including Payne—moved directly from the NIPP report into the Pentagon's Deterrence Concepts Advisory Panel, which was led by Payne and tasked with implementing George W. Bush's Nuclear Posture Review. 8

While he maintained his positions on the DPB and Deterrence Concepts Advisory Panel, in 2002 Woolsey became a vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, 9 a high-powered consulting firm and military contractor based in Virginia that has been characterized “as one of the biggest suppliers of technology and personnel to the U.S. government’s spy agencies.” 10 Woolsey also maintained close relations with a number of militarist advocacy groups, including serving as the honorary co-chair, along with Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), of Frank Gaffney’s hardline Center for Security Policy; a member of the revived Cold War-era anticommunist group Committee on the Present Danger; distinguished advisor to the neoconservative-led Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; and advisory board member of the Likudnik Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. 11 Woolsey was also actively engaged in supporting the work of two letterhead groups that helped generate 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.

Critics have decried Woolsey's simultaneous service to government and the private sector. In a March 2003 report about the potential conflicts of interest of several DPB members, the Center for Public Integrity highlighted Woolsey as an example: "Former CIA Director James Woolsey is a principal in the Paladin Capital Group, a venture-capital firm that, like 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." 12

During Senator McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, Woolsey served as an advisor—along with a number of high-profile neoconservatives like Randy Scheunemann, Gary Schmitt, and William Kristol—on the candidate’s national security policies. 13 Woolsey has also advised McCain on energy security, an issue long at the heart of Woolsey’s policy discourse. 14 Woolsey is sometimes referred to as a “greenocon,” a mélange of ideologies shared by those who, according to one critic, advocate “a Fortress America of tanks and solar panels, plug-in hybrids and nuclear reactors.” 15

A founding member of the Set America Free coalition, a pressure group aimed at highlighting the “security and economic implications of America’s growing dependence on foreign oil,” 16 Woolsey sees himself as helping pioneer a new political coalition that combines his militarist security ideology with green politics. He says, "The combination of 9/11, concern about climate change, and $4 a gallon gasoline has brought a lot of people together. I call it the coalition of the tree-huggers, the do-gooders, the cheap hawks, the evangelicals, and the mom and pop drivers. All of those groups have good reasons to be interested in moving away from oil dependence." 17

According to Woolsey, he is not alone among neoconservatives in holding these views. As Rozen reports, “Being a green neoconservative is becoming less lonely, Woolsey says, especially as more hawks come to see energy as a security issue. He tells a story about an argument with a friend who is a global warming skeptic. When Woolsey explained how improvements to the electrical infrastructure could make it safer from terrorists, his friend replied, ‘Oh, well, that's fine, then—we can do all that as long as it's not because of this fictional global warming.’ Former House leader Newt Gingrich recently came out in support of renewable energy, and the members of Woolsey's Set America Free Coalition include such prominent hawks as Daniel Pipes, Frank Gaffney, and Cliff May. ‘It's less that hawks are going green as that hawks and greens have some common interests,’ May explains.” 18 Other members of Set America Free include Gary Bauer, Sam Brownback, and Meyrav Wurmser. 19

Woolsey's government service dates back to 1969, when he served as an advisor to the U.S. Delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. 20 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, during the Reagan administration. 21 It was in the early 1980s that Woolsey became acquainted with a number of high-powered figures, including Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, with whom he would team up repeatedly over the next three decades in support of controversial defense and security polices. 22

After a brief and unhappy tenure as CIA director during Clinton's first term, Woolsey rejoined the law firm of Shea & Gardner (where he had first worked in 1973). Shea & Gardner serves a number of major corporate clients, including defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and counts among its former employers Stephen Hadley, national security advisor during George W. Bush's second term. In 2003, the firm was registered as a foreign agent performing lobbying and legal services for the Iraqi National Congress. 23 After Shea & Gardner became part of Goodwin Procter LLP, the latter registered as a foreign agent for the Iraqi National Congress Support Foundation, which “contacted U.S. Government officials to refute allegations made against Dr. Ahmed Chalabi.” 24

“War on Terror” Advocacy

Woolsey was an outspoken proponent of invading Iraq even before 9/11. A supporter of PNAC, the influential letterhead group founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan to champion a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity," Woolsey signed several PNAC open letters to government figures aimed at pressing an aggressive overseas military agenda. 25 One such letter was PNAC's 1998 missive to Clinton, which served as an opening salvo in 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." 26

After 9/11, Woolsey was among the first government advisors to call for ousting Hussein, joining Wolfowitz and Perle in pressing for an expanded war on terror that would include regime change in Iraq. 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." 27 As Jim Lobe and Michael Flynn reported,“[T]he most vociferous proponent of going after Iraq was Wolfowitz, who pressed the case repeatedly at Camp David meetings during the first critical week after the attacks. Meanwhile, Perle convened the DPB for its own meeting to recommend policy options. Extraordinarily, he invited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi to take part in the highly classified proceedings. It appears that after 9/11, the network of hawks and neoconservatives that had coalesced around [the Project for the New American Century] had mobilized in a highly coordinated way to fashion the administration's response to the terrorist attacks and rally the public behind their new agenda.” 28

Woolsey became a prominent media presence after 9/11, criticizing 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, in December 2001 Woolsey argued that "only fear will reestablish [Arab] respect for the U.S.... We need to read 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.'' 29

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 promoted by Norman Podhoretz, a central neoconservative figure, and Eliot Cohen, one of Woolsey’s DPB colleagues and a supporter of the Bush administration's response to 9/11—against totalitarian movements "all coming out of the Middle East.” 30 (Woolsey repeated the main items of this speech during another conference at UCLA that was organized by campus Republicans and Americans for Victory over Terrorism, a Claremont Institute-sponsored letterhead group for which Woolsey once served as a senior advisor. 31)

Two years later, Woolsey had refined his terminology. To the crowd at Restoration Weekend 2004, Woolsey explained his new phrase for the “war on terror”: “I used to call it World War IV, following my friend Eliot Cohen, who called it that in an op-ed right after 9/11 in the Wall Street Journal. Eliot’s point is that the Cold War was World War III. And this war is going to have more in common with the Cold War than with either World War I or II. But people hear the phrase World War and they think of Normandy and Iwo Jima and short, intense periods of principally military combat. I think Eliot’s point is the right one, which is that this war will have a strong ideological component and will last some time. So, in order to avoid the association with World Wars I and II, I started calling it the Long War of the 21st Century.” 32

Woolsey sees differences between the Cold War and this new war, as evident in his support for expanded government powers to wage the war on terror. In February 2006 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Woolsey supported the controversial phone-tapping program of the National Security Agency, saying, "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." 33

Though still supportive of the idea of regime change in Iraq, by 2006 Woolsey (along with other hawks such as Ken Adelman and Richard Perle) had begun to be critical of the way the Bush administration had carried out the Iraq, 34 while at the same time pushing for bombing other states like Syria, a country long on Woolsey’s list of targets for the war on terror. 35

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 various other "lesser pieces," such as Syria, Moqtada al-Sadr, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Woolsey suggested that North Korea might ship Iran plutonium or highly enriched uranium in diplomatic pouches for weapons 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. 36

Affiliations 37

Government Service

Private Sector 38

Education

Date of Birth

1. Laura Rozen, “James Woolsey, Hybrid Hawk,” Mother Jones, May/June 2008.
2. Laura Rozen, “James Woolsey, Hybrid Hawk,” Mother Jones, May/June 2008.
3. Laura Rozen, “James Woolsey, Hybrid Hawk,” Mother Jones, May/June 2008.
4. Federal Advisory Committees Database, “DOD 412—Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee—Agency Authority,” Fiscal Year 2004, available at http://fido.gov/facadatabase/default.asp.
5. Federal Advisory Committees Database, “DOD 10763—Deterrence Concepts Advisory Group—Agency Authority,” Fiscal Year 2001, available at http://fido.gov/facadatabase/default.asp.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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; "Advisers of Influence," Center for Public Integrity, March 2003.
9. Booz Allen Hamilton, "R. James Woolsey Joins Booz Allen as Vice President," Press Release, July 15, 2002.
10. Tim Shorrock, “Carlyle Group May Buy Major CIA Contractor: Booz Allen Hamilton,” CorpWatch, March 8, 2008, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14963.
11. Neil MacKay, "Carving Up the New Iraq," Sunday Herald, April 15, 2003.
12. "Advisers of Influence," Center for Public Integrity, March 2003.
13. The Connect U.S. Fund, “John McCain: Foreign Policy Advisers,” http://www.connectusfund.org/mccain (accessed on September 8, 2008).
14. Tim Shipman, “John McCain Hires Former CIA Director Jim Woolsey As Green Advisor,” Daily Telegraph, June 21, 2008.
15. Jackson West, “R. James Woolsey and the Rise of the Greenocons,” Valleywag blog, May 22, 2008, http://valleywag.com/392752/r-james-woolsey-and-the-rise-of-the-greenocons#viewcomments.
16. Set America Free Coalition, http://www.setamericafree.org/.
17. Tim Shipman, “John McCain Hires Former CIA Director Jim Woolsey As Green Advisor,” Daily Telegraph, June 21, 2008.
18. Laura Rozen, “James Woolsey, Hybrid Hawk,” Mother Jones, May/June 2008.
19. Set America Free, “Coalition Members,” http://www.setamericafree.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=2.
20. 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.
21. 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.
22. James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Viking, 2004).
23. Department of Justice, “Report of the Attorney General to the Congress of the United States on the Administration of the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” December 2003, p. 118, http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/fara/reports/December31-2003.pdf.
24. Department of Justice, “Report of the Attorney General to the Congress of the United States on the Administration of the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” December 2004, p. 99, http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/fara/reports/December31-2004.pdf.
25. Right Web, “A Complete List of PNAC Signatories and Contributing Writers,” http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/pnac_chart/pnac.html.
26. PNAC, “Letter to President Clinton on Iraq,” January 26, 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/20070810113947/www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm.
27. James Fallows, "Blind into Baghdad," Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2004.
28. Jim Lobe and Michael Flynn, “The Rise and Decline of the Neoconservatives: A Right Web Special Report,” Right Web, November 17, 2006, http://rightweb.irc-online.org/rw/3713.html.
29. Nina J. Easton, “The Hawk: James Woolsey Wants Iraq’s Saddam Hussein Brought to Justice,” Washington Post, December 27, 2001, p. C01.
30. James Woolsey, "World War IV," speech at Restoration Weekend, November 16, 2002, reprinted in FrontPageMagazine.com, November 22, 2002 (available at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2002/021116-ww4.htm).
31. "The Pentagon's (CIA) Man in Iraq," The Nation Blog, April 4, 2003.
32. James Woolsey, “The War for Democracy,” Speech at Restoration Weekend 2004, December 9, 2004, http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID=086976C5-12E2-4C2B-ADA5-79F4EC635DDC.
33. Testimony of James Woolsey, Hearing of The Senate Judiciary Committee, "Wartime Executive Power and The NSA's Surveillance Authority," February 28, 2006.
34. David Rose, "Neo Culpa," Vanity Fair, January 2007.
35. See, for example, Woolsey 2006 interview with FoxNews, posted on ThinkProgeress.org, “Former CIA Director Woolsey: ‘I Think We Ought To Execute Some Air Strikes Against Syria,’” July 17, 2006, http://thinkprogress.org/2006/07/17/woolsey/.
36. James Woolsey, Keynote Address at Conference on "Understanding the Iranian Threat," American Foreign Policy Council, November 15, 2006.
37. Set America Free, “Coalition Members,” http://www.setamericafree.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=2; Committee on the Present Danger, “U.S. Leaders”; Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “Biographies: Distinguished Advisors”; JINSA, “Board of Advisors: Hon. R. James Woolsey”; Right Web, “A Complete List of PNAC Signatories and Contributing Writers,” http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/pnac_chart/pnac.html.
38. Paladin Capital Group, http://www.paladincapgroup.com/team/woolsey.htm; GridPoint, “Board of Advisors,” http://www.gridpoint.com/company/advisors/; Vantage Point Venture Partners, “R. James Woolsey,” http://www.vpvp.com/sectors/clean-tech/vpvp-team/james-woolsey.html; “Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism,” 2002, p. 385; Foundation for Defense of Democracies, http://www.defenddemocracy.org/biographies/biographies_show.htm?doc_id=154779.

For media inquiries, email rightweb@publiceye.org or call (617) 666-5300.

Published by the Political Research Associates (PRA, online at http://www.publiceye.org). Copyright © 2008, Political Research Associates. All rights reserved.

Recommended citation:
"James Woolsey," Right Web Profile (Somerville, MA: Political Research Associates, September 12, 2008).

Web location:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1391.html

Production Information:
Author(s): Right Web
Editor(s): Right Web
Production: Political Research Associates