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Richard perle adnan khashoggi saudis2 Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
>http://www.newyorker.com/main/start/>http://www.newyorker.com/main/start/
>
>LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN
>
>by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
>
>Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?
>
>At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the
>Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in
>arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of
>millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he
>was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the
>Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in
>litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning
>allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan
>Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North,
>in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the
>Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten
>million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran
>which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American
>hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a
>congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of
>the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce
>International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of
>depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.
>
>Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a
>private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi
>industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in
>construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle
>East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who
>is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war
>with Iraq.
>
>The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed
>primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired
>military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay,
>include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and
>heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon
>to review and assess the country's strategic defense policies.
>
>Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called
>Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in
>Delaware. Trireme's main business, according to a two-page letter that one
>of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in
>companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to
>homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of
>terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in
>countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.
>
>The letter mentioned the firm's government connections prominently: "Three
>of Trireme's Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary
>of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of
>Trireme's principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of that Board." The two
>other policy-board members associated with Trireme are Henry Kissinger,
>the former Secretary of State (who is, in fact, only a member of Trireme's
>advisory group and is not involved in its management), and Gerald Hillman,
>an investor and a close business associate of Perle's who handles matters
>in Trireme's New York office. The letter said that forty-five million
>dollars had already been raised, including twenty million dollars from
>Boeing; the purpose, clearly, was to attract more investors, such as
>Khashoggi and Zuhair.
>
>
>Perle served as a foreign-policy adviser in George W. Bush's Presidential
>campaign--he had been an Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald
>Reagan--but he chose not to take a senior position in the Administration.
>In mid-2001, however, he accepted an offer from Secretary of Defense
>Donald Rumsfeld to chair the Defense Policy Board, a then obscure group
>that had been created by the Defense Department in 1985. Its members
>(there are around thirty of them) may be outside the government, but they
>have access to classified information and to senior policymakers, and give
>advice not only on strategic policy but also on such matters as weapons
>procurement. Most of the board's proceedings are confidential.
>
>As chairman of the board, Perle is considered to be a special government
>employee and therefore subject to a federal Code of Conduct. Those rules
>bar a special employee from participating in an official capacity in any
>matter in which he has a financial interest. "One of the general rules is
>that you don't take advantage of your federal position to help yourself
>financially in any way," a former government attorney who helped formulate
>the Code of Conduct told me. The point, the attorney added, is to "protect
>government processes from actual or apparent conflicts."
>
>Advisory groups like the Defense Policy Board enable knowledgeable people
>outside government to bring their skills and expertise to bear, in
>confidence, on key policy issues. Because such experts are often tied to
>the defense industry, however, there are inevitable conflicts. One board
>member told me that most members are active in finance and business, and
>on at least one occasion a member has left a meeting when a military or an
>intelligence product in which he has an active interest has come under
>discussion.
>
>Four members of the Defense Policy Board told me that the board, which met
>most recently on February 27th and 28th, had not been informed of Perle's
>involvement in Trireme. One board member, upon being told of Trireme and
>Perle's meeting with Khashoggi, exclaimed, "Oh, get out of here. He's the
>chairman! If you had a story about me setting up a company for homeland
>security, and I've put people on the board with whom I'm doing that
>business, I'd be had"--a reference to Gerald Hillman, who had almost no
>senior policy or military experience in government before being offered a
>post on the policy board. "Seems to me this is at the edge of or off the
>ethical charts. I think it would stink to high heaven."
>
>Hillman, a former McKinsey consultant, stunned at least one board member
>at the February meeting when he raised questions about the validity of
>Iraq's existing oil contracts. "Hillman said the old contracts are bad
>news; he said we should kick out the Russians and the French," the board
>member told me. "This was a serious conversation. We'd become the brokers.
>Then we'd be selling futures in the Iraqi oil company. I said to myself,
>'Oh, man. Don't go down that road.'" Hillman denies making such statements
>at the meeting.
>
>Larry Noble, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for
>Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research organization, said of Perle's
>Trireme involvement, "It's not illegal, but it presents an appearance of a
>conflict. It's enough to raise questions about the advice he's giving to
>the Pentagon and why people in business are dealing with him." Noble
>added, "The question is whether he's trading off his advisory-committee
>relationship. If it's a selling point for the firm he's involved with,
>that means he's a closer--the guy you bring in who doesn't have to talk
>about money, but he's the reason you're doing the deal."
>
>Perle's association with Trireme was not his first exposure to the link
>between high finance and high-level politics. He was born in New York
>City, graduated from the University of Southern California in 1964, and
>spent a decade in Senate-staff jobs before leaving government in 1980, to
>work for a military-consulting firm. The next year, he was back in
>government, as Assistant Secretary of Defense. In 1983, he was the subject
>of a New York Times investigation into an allegation that he recommended
>that the Army buy weapons from an Israeli company from whose owners he
>had, two years earlier, accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar fee. Perle later
>acknowledged that he had accepted the fee, but vigorously denied any
>wrongdoing. He had not recused himself in the matter, he explained,
>because the fee was for work he had done before he took the Defense
>Department job. He added, "The ultimate issue, of course, was a question
>of procurement, and I am not a procurement officer." He was never
>officially accused of any ethical violations in the matter. Perle served
>in the Pentagon until 1987 and then became deeply involved in the lobbying
>and business worlds. Among other corporate commitments, he now serves as a
>director of a company doing business with the federal government: the
>Autonomy Corporation, a British firm that recently won a major federal
>contract in homeland security. When I asked him about that contract, Perle
>told me that there was no possible conflict, because the contract was
>obtained through competitive bidding, and "I never talked to anybody about it."
>
>
>Under Perle's leadership, the policy board has become increasingly
>influential. He has used it as a bully pulpit, from which to advocate the
>overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the use of preëmptive military action to
>combat terrorism. Perle had many allies for this approach, such as Paul
>Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, but there was intense
>resistance throughout the bureaucracy--most notably at the State
>Department. Preëmption has since emerged as the overriding idea behind the
>Administration's foreign policy. One former high-level intelligence
>official spoke with awe of Perle's ability to "radically change government
>policy" even though he is a private citizen. "It's an impressive
>achievement that an outsider can have so much influence, and has even been
>given an institutional base for his influence."
>
>Perle's authority in the Bush Administration is buttressed by close
>association, politically and personally, with many important
>Administration figures, including Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the
>Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, who is the Pentagon's third-ranking
>civilian official. In 1989, Feith created International Advisors
>Incorporated, a lobbying firm whose main client was the government of
>Turkey. The firm retained Perle as an adviser between 1989 and 1994. Feith
>got his current position, according to a former high-level Defense
>Department official, only after Perle personally intervened with Rumsfeld,
>who was skeptical about him. Feith was directly involved in the strategic
>planning and conduct of the military operations against the Taliban in
>Afghanistan; he now runs various aspects of the planning of the Iraqi war
>and its aftermath. He and Perle share the same views on many
>foreign-policy issues. Both have been calling for Saddam Hussein's removal
>for years, long before September 11th. They also worked together, in 1996,
>to prepare a list of policy initiatives for Benjamin Netanyahu, shortly
>after his election as the Israeli Prime Minister. The suggestions included
>working toward regime change in Iraq. Feith and Perle were energetic
>supporters of Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial leader of the anti-Saddam
>Iraqi National Congress, and have struggled with officials at the State
>Department and the C.I.A. about the future of Iraq.
>
>Perle has also been an outspoken critic of the Saudi government, and
>Americans who are in its pay. He has often publicly rebuked former
>American government officials who are connected to research centers and
>foundations that are funded by the Saudis, and told the National Review
>last summer, "I think it's a disgrace. They're the people who appear on
>television, they write op-ed pieces. The Saudis are a major source of the
>problem we face with terrorism. That would be far more obvious to people
>if it weren't for this community of former diplomats effectively working
>for this foreign government." In August, the Saudi government was dismayed
>when the Washington Post revealed that the Defense Policy Board had
>received a briefing on July 10th from a Rand Corporation analyst named
>Laurent Murawiec, who depicted Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United
>States, and recommended that the Bush Administration give the Saudi
>government an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its
>financial assets in the United States and its oil fields. Murawiec, it was
>later found, is a former editor of the Executive Intelligence Review , a
>magazine controlled by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., the perennial Presidential
>candidate, conspiracy theorist, and felon. According to Time, it was Perle
>himself who had invited Murawiec to make his presentation.
>
>
>Perle's hostility to the politics of the Saudi government did not stop him
>from meeting with potential Saudi investors for Trireme. Khashoggi and
>Zuhair told me that they understood that one of Trireme's objectives was
>to seek the help of influential Saudis to win homeland-security contracts
>with the Saudi royal family for the businesses it financed. The profits
>for such contracts could be substantial. Saudi Arabia has spent nearly a
>billion dollars to survey and demarcate its eight-hundred-and-fifty-mile
>border with Yemen, and the second stage of that process will require
>billions more. Trireme apparently turned to Adnan Khashoggi for help.
>
>Last month, I spoke with Khashoggi, who is sixty-seven and is recovering
>from open-heart surgery, at his penthouse apartment, overlooking the
>Mediterranean in Cannes. "I was the intermediary," he said. According to
>Khashoggi, he was first approached by a Trireme official named Christopher
>Harriman. Khashoggi said that Harriman, an American businessman whom he
>knew from his jet-set days, when both men were fixtures on the European
>social scene, sent him the Trireme pitch letter. (Harriman has not
>answered my calls.) Khashoggi explained that before Christmas he and Harb
>Zuhair, the Saudi industrialist, had met with Harriman and Gerald Hillman
>in Paris and had discussed the possibility of a large investment in Trireme.
>
>Zuhair was interested in more than the financial side; he also wanted to
>share his views on war and peace with someone who had influence with the
>Bush Administration. Though a Saudi, he had been born in Iraq, and he
>hoped that a negotiated, "step by step" solution could be found to avoid
>war. Zuhair recalls telling Harriman and Hillman, "If we have peace, it
>would be easy to raise a hundred million. We will bring development to the
>region." Zuhair's hope, Khashoggi told me, was to combine opportunities
>for peace with opportunities for investment. According to Khashoggi,
>Hillman and Harriman said that such a meeting could be arranged. Perle
>emerged, by virtue of his position on the policy board, as a natural
>catch; he was "the hook," Khashoggi said, for obtaining the investment
>from Zuhair. Khashoggi said that he agreed to try to assemble potential
>investors for a private lunch with Perle.
>
>
>The lunch took place on January 3rd at a seaside restaurant in Marseilles.
>(Perle has a vacation home in the South of France.) Those who attended the
>lunch differ about its purpose. According to both Khashoggi and Zuhair,
>there were two items on the agenda. The first was to give Zuhair a chance
>to propose a peaceful alternative to war with Iraq; Khashoggi said that he
>and Perle knew that such an alternative was far-fetched, but Zuhair had
>recently returned from a visit to Baghdad, and was eager to talk about it.
>The second, more important item, according to Khashoggi and Zuhair, was to
>pave the way for Zuhair to put together a group of ten Saudi businessmen
>who would invest ten million dollars each in Trireme.
>
>"It was normal for us to see Perle," Khashoggi told me. "We in the Middle
>East are accustomed to politicians who use their offices for whatever
>business they want. I organized the lunch for the purpose of Harb Zuhair
>to put his language to Perle. Perle politely listened, and the lunch was
>over." Zuhair, in a telephone conversation with me, recalled that Perle
>had made it clear at the lunch that "he was above the money. He said he
>was more involved in politics, and the business is through the
>company"--Trireme. Perle, throughout the lunch, "stuck to his idea that
>'we have to get rid of Saddam,'" Zuhair said. As of early March, to the
>knowledge of Zuhair, no Saudi money had yet been invested in Trireme.
>
>In my first telephone conversation with Gerald Hillman, in mid-February,
>before I knew of the involvement of Khashoggi and Zuhair, he assured me
>that Trireme had "nothing to do" with the Saudis. "I don't know what you
>can do with them," he said. "What we saw on September 11th was a grotesque
>manifestation of their ideology. Americans believe that the Saudis are
>supporting terrorism. We have no investment from them, or with them."
>(Last week, he acknowledged that he had met with Khashoggi and Zuhair, but
>said that the meeting had been arranged by Harriman and that he hadn't
>known that Zuhair would be there.) Perle, he insisted in February, "is not
>a financial creature. He doesn't have any desire for financial gain."
>
>Perle, in a series of telephone interviews, acknowledged that he had met
>with two Saudis at the lunch in Marseilles, but he did not divulge their
>identities. (At that time, I still didn't know who they were.) "There were
>two Saudis there," he said. "But there was no discussion of Trireme. It
>was never mentioned and never discussed." He firmly stated, "The lunch was
>not about money. It just would never have occurred to me to discuss
>investments, given the circumstances." Perle added that one of the Saudis
>had information that Saddam was ready to surrender. "His message was a
>plea to negotiate with Saddam."
>
>When I asked Perle whether the Saudi businessmen at the lunch were being
>considered as possible investors in Trireme, he replied, "I don't want
>Saudis as such, but the fund is open to any investor, and our European
>partners said that, through investment banks, they had had Saudis as
>investors." Both Perle and Hillman stated categorically that there were
>currently no Saudi investments.
>
>Khashoggi professes to be amused by the activities of Perle and Hillman as
>members of the policy board. As Khashoggi saw it, Trireme's business
>potential depended on a war in Iraq taking place. "If there is no war," he
>told me, "why is there a need for security? If there is a war, of course,
>billions of dollars will have to be spent." He commented, "You Americans
>blind yourself with your high integrity and your democratic morality
>against peddling influence, but they were peddling influence."
>
>
>When Perle's lunch with Khashoggi and Zuhair, and his connection to
>Trireme, became known to a few ranking members of the Saudi royal family,
>they reacted with anger and astonishment. The meeting in Marseilles left
>Perle, one of the kingdom's most vehement critics, exposed to a ferocious
>counterattack.
>
>Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who has served as the Saudi Ambassador to the
>United States for twenty years, told me that he had got wind of Perle's
>involvement with Trireme and the lunch in Marseilles. Bandar, who is in
>his early fifties, is a prominent member of the royal family (his father
>is the defense minister). He said that he was told that the contacts
>between Perle and Trireme and the Saudis were purely business, on all
>sides. After the 1991 Gulf War, Bandar told me, Perle had been involved in
>an unsuccessful attempt to sell security systems to the Saudi government,
>"and this company does security systems." (Perle confirmed that he had
>been on the board of a company that attempted to make such a sale but said
>he was not directly involved in the project.)
>
>"There is a split personality to Perle," Bandar said. "Here he is, on the
>one hand, trying to make a hundred-million-dollar deal, and, on the other
>hand, there were elements of the appearance of blackmail--'If we get in
>business, he'll back off on Saudi Arabia'--as I have been informed by
>participants in the meeting."
>
>As for Perle's meeting with Khashoggi and Zuhair, and the assertion that
>its purpose was to discuss politics, Bandar said, "There has to be
>deniability, and a cover story--a possible peace initiative in Iraq--is
>needed. I believe the Iraqi events are irrelevant. A business meeting took
>place."
>
>
>Zuhair, however, was apparently convinced that, thanks to his discussions
>with Trireme, he would have a chance to enter into a serious discussion
>with Perle about peace. A few days after the meeting in Paris, Hillman had
>sent Khashoggi a twelve-point memorandum, dated December 26, 2002, setting
>the conditions that Iraq would have to meet. " It is my belief ," the
>memorandum stated, "that if the United States obtained the following
>results it would not go to war against Iraq." Saddam would have to admit
>that "Iraq has developed, and possesses, weapons of mass destruction." He
>then would be allowed to resign and leave Iraq immediately, with his sons
>and some of his ministers.
>
>Hillman sent Khashoggi a second memorandum a week later, the day before
>the lunch with Perle in Marseilles. "Following our recent discussions," it
>said, "we have been thinking about an immediate test to ascertain that
>Iraq is sincere in its desire to surrender." Five more steps were
>outlined, and an ambitious final request was made: that Khashoggi and
>Zuhair arrange a meeting with Prince Nawaf Abdul Aziz, the Saudi
>intelligence chief, "so that we can assist in Washington."
>
>Both Khashoggi and Zuhair were skeptical of the memorandums. Zuhair found
>them "absurd," and Khashoggi told me that he thought they were amusing,
>and almost silly. "This was their thinking?" he recalled asking himself.
>"There was nothing to react to. While Harb was lobbying for Iraq, they
>were lobbying for Perle."
>
>In my initial conversation with Hillman, he said, "Richard had nothing to
>do with the writing of those letters. I informed him of it afterward, and
>he never said one word, even after I sent them to him. I thought my ideas
>were pretty clear, but I didn't think Saddam would resign and I didn't
>think he'd go into exile. I'm positive Richard does not believe that any
>of those things would happen." Hillman said that he had drafted the
>memorandums with the help of his daughter, a college student. Perle, for
>his part, told me, "I didn't write them and didn't supply any content to
>them. I didn't know about them until after they were drafted."
>
>The views set forth in the memorandums were, indeed, very different from
>those held by Perle, who has said publicly that Saddam will leave office
>only if he is forced out, and from those of his fellow hard-liners in the
>Bush Administration. Given Perle's importance in American decision-making,
>and the risks of relying on a deal-maker with Adnan Khashoggi's history,
>questions remain about Hillman's drafting of such an amateurish peace
>proposal for Zuhair. Prince Bandar's assertion--that the talk of peace was
>merely a pretext for some hard selling--is difficult to dismiss.
>
>Hillman's proposals, meanwhile, took on an unlikely life of their own. A
>month after the lunch, the proposals made their way to Al Hayat , a
>Saudi-owned newspaper published in London. If Perle had ever intended to
>dissociate himself from them, he did not succeed. The newspaper, in a
>dispatch headlined "washington offers to avert war in return for an
>international agreement to exile saddam ," characterized Hillman's
>memorandums as "American" documents and said that the new proposals bore
>Perle's imprimatur. The paper said that Perle and others had attended a
>series of "secret meetings" in an effort to avoid the pending war with
>Iraq, and "a scenario was discussed whereby Saddam Hussein would
>personally admit that his country was attempting to acquire weapons of
>mass destruction and he would agree to stop trying to acquire these
>weapons while he awaits exile."
>
>A few days later, the Beirut daily Al Safir published Arabic translations
>of the memorandums themselves, attributing them to Richard Perle. The
>proposals were said to have been submitted by Perle, and to "outline
>Washington's future visions of Iraq." Perle's lunch with two Saudi
>businessmen was now elevated by Al Safir to a series of "recent
>American-Saudi negotiations" in which "the American side was represented
>by Richard Perle." The newspaper added, "Publishing these documents is
>important because they shed light on the story of how war could have been
>avoided." The documents, of course, did nothing of the kind.
>
>When Perle was asked whether his dealings with Trireme might present the
>appearance of a conflict of interest, he said that anyone who saw such a
>conflict would be thinking "maliciously." But Perle, in crisscrossing
>between the public and the private sectors, has put himself in a difficult
>position--one not uncommon to public men. He is credited with being the
>intellectual force behind a war that not everyone wants and that many
>suspect, however unfairly, of being driven by American business interests.
>There is no question that Perle believes that removing Saddam from power
>is the right thing to do. At the same time, he has set up a company that
>may gain from a war. In doing so, he has given ammunition not only to the
>Saudis but to his other ideological opponents as well.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN
>
>by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
>
>Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?
>
>At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the
>Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in
>arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of
>millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he
>was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the
>Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in
>litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning
>allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan
>Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North,
>in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the
>Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten
>million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran
>which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American
>hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a
>congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of
>the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce
>International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of
>depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.
>
>Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a
>private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi
>industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in
>construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle
>East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who
>is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war
>with Iraq.
>
>The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed
>primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired
>military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay,
>include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and
>heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon
>to review and assess the country s strategic defense policies.
>
>Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called
>Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in
>Delaware. Trireme s main business, according to a two-page letter that one
>of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in
>companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to
>homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of
>terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in
>countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.
>
>The letter mentioned the firm s government connections prominently: Three
>of Trireme s Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary
>of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of Trireme
>s principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of that Board. The two other
>policy-board members associated with Trireme are Henry Kissinger, the
>former Secretary of State (who is, in fact, only a member of Trireme s
>advisory group and is not involved in its management), and Gerald Hillman,
>an investor and a close business associate of Perle s who handles matters
>in Trireme s New York office. The letter said that forty-five million
>dollars had already been raised, including twenty million dollars from
>Boeing; the purpose, clearly, was to attract more investors, such as
>Khashoggi and Zuhair.
>
>Perle served as a foreign-policy adviser in George W. Bush s Presidential
>campaign he had been an Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan
>but he chose not to take a senior position in the Administration. In
>mid-2001, however, he accepted an offer from Secretary of Defense Donald
>Rumsfeld to chair the Defense Policy Board, a then obscure group that had
>been created by the Defense Department in 1985. Its members (there are
>around thirty of them) may be outside the government, but they have access
>to classified information and to senior policymakers, and give advice not
>only on strategic policy but also on such matters as weapons procurement.
>Most of the board s proceedings are confidential.
>
>As chairman of the board, Perle is considered to be a special government
>employee and therefore subject to a federal Code of Conduct. Those rules
>bar a special employee from participating in an official capacity in any
>matter in which he has a financial interest. One of the general rules is
>that you don t take advantage of your federal position to help yourself
>financially in any way, a former government attorney who helped formulate
>the Code of Conduct told me. The point, the attorney added, is to protect
>government processes from actual or apparent conflicts.
>
>Advisory groups like the Defense Policy Board enable knowledgeable people
>outside government to bring their skills and expertise to bear, in
>confidence, on key policy issues. Because such experts are often tied to
>the defense industry, however, there are inevitable conflicts. One board
>member told me that most members are active in finance and business, and
>on at least one occasion a member has left a meeting when a military or an
>intelligence product in which he has an active interest has come under
>discussion.
>
>Four members of the Defense Policy Board told me that the board, which met
>most recently on February 27th and 28th, had not been informed of Perle s
>involvement in Trireme. One board member, upon being told of Trireme and
>Perle s meeting with Khashoggi, exclaimed, Oh, get out of here. He s the
>chairman! If you had a story about me setting up a company for homeland
>security, and I ve put people on the board with whom I m doing that
>business, I d be had a reference to Gerald Hillman, who had almost no
>senior policy or military experience in government before being offered a
>post on the policy board. Seems to me this is at the edge of or off the
>ethical charts. I think it would stink to high heaven.
>
>Hillman, a former McKinsey consultant, stunned at least one board member
>at the February meeting when he raised questions about the validity of
>Iraq s existing oil contracts. Hillman said the old contracts are bad
>news; he said we should kick out the Russians and the French, the board
>member told me. This was a serious conversation. We d become the brokers.
>Then we d be selling futures in the Iraqi oil company. I said to myself,
>Oh, man. Don t go down that road. Hillman denies making such statements at
>the meeting.
>
>Larry Noble, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for
>Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research organization, said of Perle s
>Trireme involvement, It s not illegal, but it presents an appearance of a
>conflict. It s enough to raise questions about the advice he s giving to
>the Pentagon and why people in business are dealing with him. Noble added,
>The question is whether he s trading off his advisory-committee
>relationship. If it s a selling point for the firm he s involved with,
>that means he s a closer the guy you bring in who doesn t have to talk
>about money, but he s the reason you re doing the deal.
>
>Perle s association with Trireme was not his first exposure to the link
>between high finance and high-level politics. He was born in New York
>City, graduated from the University of Southern California in 1964, and
>spent a decade in Senate-staff jobs before leaving government in 1980, to
>work for a military-consulting firm. The next year, he was back in
>government, as Assistant Secretary of Defense. In 1983, he was the subject
>of a New York Times investigation into an allegation that he recommended
>that the Army buy weapons from an Israeli company from whose owners he
>had, two years earlier, accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar fee. Perle later
>acknowledged that he had accepted the fee, but vigorously denied any
>wrongdoing. He had not recused himself in the matter, he explained,
>because the fee was for work he had done before he took the Defense
>Department job. He added, The ultimate issue, of course, was a question of
>procurement, and I am not a procurement officer. He was never officially
>accused of any ethical violations in the matter. Perle served in the
>Pentagon until 1987 and then became deeply involved in the lobbying and
>business worlds. Among other corporate commitments, he now serves as a
>director of a company doing business with the federal government: the
>Autonomy Corporation, a British firm that recently won a major federal
>contract in homeland security. When I asked him about that contract, Perle
>told me that there was no possible conflict, because the contract was
>obtained through competitive bidding, and I never talked to anybody about it.
>
>Under Perle s leadership, the policy board has become increasingly
>influential. He has used it as a bully pulpit, from which to advocate the
>overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the use of preëmptive military action to
>combat terrorism. Perle had many allies for this approach, such as Paul
>Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, but there was intense
>resistance throughout the bureaucracy most notably at the State
>Department. Preëmption has since emerged as the overriding idea behind the
>Administration s foreign policy. One former high-level intelligence
>official spoke with awe of Perle s ability to radically change government
>policy even though he is a private citizen. It s an impressive achievement
>that an outsider can have so much influence, and has even been given an
>institutional base for his influence.
>
>Perle s authority in the Bush Administration is buttressed by close
>association, politically and personally, with many important
>Administration figures, including Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the
>Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, who is the Pentagon s third-ranking
>civilian official. In 1989, Feith created International Advisors
>Incorporated, a lobbying firm whose main client was the government of
>Turkey. The firm retained Perle as an adviser between 1989 and 1994. Feith
>got his current position, according to a former high-level Defense
>Department official, only after Perle personally intervened with Rumsfeld,
>who was skeptical about him. Feith was directly involved in the strategic
>planning and conduct of the military operations against the Taliban in
>Afghanistan; he now runs various aspects of the planning of the Iraqi war
>and its aftermath. He and Perle share the same views on many
>foreign-policy issues. Both have been calling for Saddam Hussein s removal
>for years, long before September 11th. They also worked together, in 1996,
>to prepare a list of policy initiatives for Benjamin Netanyahu, shortly
>after his election as the Israeli Prime Minister. The suggestions included
>working toward regime change in Iraq. Feith and Perle were energetic
>supporters of Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial leader of the anti-Saddam
>Iraqi National Congress, and have struggled with officials at the State
>Department and the C.I.A. about the future of Iraq.
>
>Perle has also been an outspoken critic of the Saudi government, and
>Americans who are in its pay. He has often publicly rebuked former
>American government officials who are connected to research centers and
>foundations that are funded by the Saudis, and told the National Review
>last summer, I think it s a disgrace. They re the people who appear on
>television, they write op-ed pieces. The Saudis are a major source of the
>problem we face with terrorism. That would be far more obvious to people
>if it weren t for this community of former diplomats effectively working
>for this foreign government. In August, the Saudi government was dismayed
>when the Washington Post revealed that the Defense Policy Board had
>received a briefing on July 10th from a Rand Corporation analyst named
>Laurent Murawiec, who depicted Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United
>States, and recommended that the Bush Administration give the Saudi
>government an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its
>financial assets in the United States and its oil fields. Murawiec, it was
>later found, is a former editor of the Executive Intelligence Review , a
>magazine controlled by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., the perennial Presidential
>candidate, conspiracy theorist, and felon. According to Time, it was Perle
>himself who had invited Murawiec to make his presentation.
>
>Perle s hostility to the politics of the Saudi government did not stop him
>from meeting with potential Saudi investors for Trireme. Khashoggi and
>Zuhair told me that they understood that one of Trireme s objectives was
>to seek the help of influential Saudis to win homeland-security contracts
>with the Saudi royal family for the businesses it financed. The profits
>for such contracts could be substantial. Saudi Arabia has spent nearly a
>billion dollars to survey and demarcate its eight-hundred-and-fifty-mile
>border with Yemen, and the second stage of that process will require
>billions more. Trireme apparently turned to Adnan Khashoggi for help.
>
>Last month, I spoke with Khashoggi, who is sixty-seven and is recovering
>from open-heart surgery, at his penthouse apartment, overlooking the
>Mediterranean in Cannes. I was the intermediary, he said. According to
>Khashoggi, he was first approached by a Trireme official named Christopher
>Harriman. Khashoggi said that Harriman, an American businessman whom he
>knew from his jet-set days, when both men were fixtures on the European
>social scene, sent him the Trireme pitch letter. (Harriman has not
>answered my calls.) Khashoggi explained that before Christmas he and Harb
>Zuhair, the Saudi industrialist, had met with Harriman and Gerald Hillman
>in Paris and had discussed the possibility of a large investment in Trireme.
>
>Zuhair was interested in more than the financial side; he also wanted to
>share his views on war and peace with someone who had influence with the
>Bush Administration. Though a Saudi, he had been born in Iraq, and he
>hoped that a negotiated, step by step solution could be found to avoid
>war. Zuhair recalls telling Harriman and Hillman, If we have peace, it
>would be easy to raise a hundred million. We will bring development to the
>region. Zuhair s hope, Khashoggi told me, was to combine opportunities for
>peace with opportunities for investment. According to Khashoggi, Hillman
>and Harriman said that such a meeting could be arranged. Perle emerged, by
>virtue of his position on the policy board, as a natural catch; he was the
>hook, Khashoggi said, for obtaining the investment from Zuhair. Khashoggi
>said that he agreed to try to assemble potential investors for a private
>lunch with Perle.
>
>The lunch took place on January 3rd at a seaside restaurant in Marseilles.
>(Perle has a vacation home in the South of France.) Those who attended the
>lunch differ about its purpose. According to both Khashoggi and Zuhair,
>there were two items on the agenda. The first was to give Zuhair a chance
>to propose a peaceful alternative to war with Iraq; Khashoggi said that he
>and Perle knew that such an alternative was far-fetched, but Zuhair had
>recently returned from a visit to Baghdad, and was eager to talk about it.
>The second, more important item, according to Khashoggi and Zuhair, was to
>pave the way for Zuhair to put together a group of ten Saudi businessmen
>who would invest ten million dollars each in Trireme.
>
>It was normal for us to see Perle, Khashoggi told me. We in the Middle
>East are accustomed to politicians who use their offices for whatever
>business they want. I organized the lunch for the purpose of Harb Zuhair
>to put his language to Perle. Perle politely listened, and the lunch was
>over. Zuhair, in a telephone conversation with me, recalled that Perle had
>made it clear at the lunch that he was above the money. He said he was
>more involved in politics, and the business is through the company
>Trireme. Perle, throughout the lunch, stuck to his idea that we have to
>get rid of Saddam, Zuhair said. As of early March, to the knowledge of
>Zuhair, no Saudi money had yet been invested in Trireme.
>
>In my first telephone conversation with Gerald Hillman, in mid-February,
>before I knew of the involvement of Khashoggi and Zuhair, he assured me
>that Trireme had nothing to do with the Saudis. I don t know what you can
>do with them, he said. What we saw on September 11th was a grotesque
>manifestation of their ideology. Americans believe that the Saudis are
>supporting terrorism. We have no investment from them, or with them. (Last
>week, he acknowledged that he had met with Khashoggi and Zuhair, but said
>that the meeting had been arranged by Harriman and that he hadn t known
>that Zuhair would be there.) Perle, he insisted in February, is not a
>financial creature. He doesn t have any desire for financial gain.
>
>Perle, in a series of telephone interviews, acknowledged that he had met
>with two Saudis at the lunch in Marseilles, but he did not divulge their
>identities. (At that time, I still didn t know who they were.) There were
>two Saudis there, he said. But there was no discussion of Trireme. It was
>never mentioned and never discussed. He firmly stated, The lunch was not
>about money. It just would never have occurred to me to discuss
>investments, given the circumstances. Perle added that one of the Saudis
>had information that Saddam was ready to surrender. His message was a plea
>to negotiate with Saddam.
>
>When I asked Perle whether the Saudi businessmen at the lunch were being
>considered as possible investors in Trireme, he replied, I don t want
>Saudis as such, but the fund is open to any investor, and our European
>partners said that, through investment banks, they had had Saudis as
>investors. Both Perle and Hillman stated categorically that there were
>currently no Saudi investments.
>
>Khashoggi professes to be amused by the activities of Perle and Hillman as
>members of the policy board. As Khashoggi saw it, Trireme s business
>potential depended on a war in Iraq taking place. If there is no war, he
>told me, why is there a need for security? If there is a war, of course,
>billions of dollars will have to be spent. He commented, You Americans
>blind yourself with your high integrity and your democratic morality
>against peddling influence, but they were peddling influence.
>
>When Perle s lunch with Khashoggi and Zuhair, and his connection to
>Trireme, became known to a few ranking members of the Saudi royal family,
>they reacted with anger and astonishment. The meeting in Marseilles left
>Perle, one of the kingdom s most vehement critics, exposed to a ferocious
>counterattack.
>
>Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who has served as the Saudi Ambassador to the
>United States for twenty years, told me that he had got wind of Perle s
>involvement with Trireme and the lunch in Marseilles. Bandar, who is in
>his early fifties, is a prominent member of the royal family (his father
>is the defense minister). He said that he was told that the contacts
>between Perle and Trireme and the Saudis were purely business, on all
>sides. After the 1991 Gulf War, Bandar told me, Perle had been involved in
>an unsuccessful attempt to sell security systems to the Saudi government,
>and this company does security systems. (Perle confirmed that he had been
>on the board of a company that attempted to make such a sale but said he
>was not directly involved in the project.)
>
>There is a split personality to Perle, Bandar said. Here he is, on the one
>hand, trying to make a hundred-million-dollar deal, and, on the other
>hand, there were elements of the appearance of blackmail If we get in
>business, he ll back off on Saudi Arabia as I have been informed by
>participants in the meeting.
>
>As for Perle s meeting with Khashoggi and Zuhair, and the assertion that
>its purpose was to discuss politics, Bandar said, There has to be
>deniability, and a cover story a possible peace initiative in Iraq is
>needed. I believe the Iraqi events are irrelevant. A business meeting took
>place.
>
>Zuhair, however, was apparently convinced that, thanks to his discussions
>with Trireme, he would have a chance to enter into a serious discussion
>with Perle about peace. A few days after the meeting in Paris, Hillman had
>sent Khashoggi a twelve-point memorandum, dated December 26, 2002, setting
>the conditions that Iraq would have to meet. It is my belief , the
>memorandum stated, that if the United States obtained the following
>results it would not go to war against Iraq. Saddam would have to admit
>that Iraq has developed, and possesses, weapons of mass destruction. He
>then would be allowed to resign and leave Iraq immediately, with his sons
>and some of his ministers.
>
>Hillman sent Khashoggi a second memorandum a week later, the day before
>the lunch with Perle in Marseilles. Following our recent discussions, it
>said, we have been thinking about an immediate test to ascertain that Iraq
>is sincere in its desire to surrender. Five more steps were outlined, and
>an ambitious final request was made: that Khashoggi and Zuhair arrange a
>meeting with Prince Nawaf Abdul Aziz, the Saudi intelligence chief, so
>that we can assist in Washington.
>
>Both Khashoggi and Zuhair were skeptical of the memorandums. Zuhair found
>them absurd, and Khashoggi told me that he thought they were amusing, and
>almost silly. This was their thinking? he recalled asking himself. There
>was nothing to react to. While Harb was lobbying for Iraq, they were
>lobbying for Perle.
>
>In my initial conversation with Hillman, he said, Richard had nothing to
>do with the writing of those letters. I informed him of it afterward, and
>he never said one word, even after I sent them to him. I thought my ideas
>were pretty clear, but I didn t think Saddam would resign and I didn t
>think he d go into exile. I m positive Richard does not believe that any
>of those things would happen. Hillman said that he had drafted the
>memorandums with the help of his daughter, a college student. Perle, for
>his part, told me, I didn t write them and didn t supply any content to
>them. I didn t know about them until after they were drafted.
>
>The views set forth in the memorandums were, indeed, very different from
>those held by Perle, who has said publicly that Saddam will leave office
>only if he is forced out, and from those of his fellow hard-liners in the
>Bush Administration. Given Perle s importance in American decision-making,
>and the risks of relying on a deal-maker with Adnan Khashoggi s history,
>questions remain about Hillman s drafting of such an amateurish peace
>proposal for Zuhair. Prince Bandar s assertion that the talk of peace was
>merely a pretext for some hard selling is difficult to dismiss.
>
>Hillman s proposals, meanwhile, took on an unlikely life of their own. A
>month after the lunch, the proposals made their way to Al Hayat , a
>Saudi-owned newspaper published in London. If Perle had ever intended to
>dissociate himself from them, he did not succeed. The newspaper, in a
>dispatch headlined washington offers to avert war in return for an
>international agreement to exile saddam , characterized Hillman s
>memorandums as American documents and said that the new proposals bore
>Perle s imprimatur. The paper said that Perle and others had attended a
>series of secret meetings in an effort to avoid the pending war with Iraq,
>and a scenario was discussed whereby Saddam Hussein would personally admit
>that his country was attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction and
>he would agree to stop trying to acquire these weapons while he awaits exile.
>
>A few days later, the Beirut daily Al Safir published Arabic translations
>of the memorandums themselves, attributing them to Richard Perle. The
>proposals were said to have been submitted by Perle, and to outline
>Washington s future visions of Iraq. Perle s lunch with two Saudi
>businessmen was now elevated by Al Safir to a series of recent
>American-Saudi negotiations in which the American side was represented by
>Richard Perle. The newspaper added, Publishing these documents is
>important because they shed light on the story of how war could have been
>avoided. The documents, of course, did nothing of the kind.
>
>When Perle was asked whether his dealings with Trireme might present the
>appearance of a conflict of interest, he said that anyone who saw such a
>conflict would be thinking maliciously. But Perle, in crisscrossing
>between the public and the private sectors, has put himself in a difficult
>position one not uncommon to public men. He is credited with being the
>intellectual force behind a war that not everyone wants and that many
>suspect, however unfairly, of being driven by American business interests.
>There is no question that Perle believes that removing Saddam from power
>is the right thing to do. At the same time, he has set up a company that
>may gain from a war. In doing so, he has given ammunition not only to the
>Saudis but to his other ideological opponents as well.
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