[NUJ Bristol] Chief US war advisor to sue 'terrorist' writer

Last week Richard Perle, chairman of the pentagon's private Defense
Policy Board, called journalist Seymour Hersh a 'terrorist' on CNN
for the views he expressed in the article below.

Background on Perle
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interviews/perle
html
More b/ground
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1994.htm
CNN transcript
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0303/09/le.00.html

This is the article Perle is threatening to sue over in the British
courts.

LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030317fa_fact
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?
Issue of 2003-03-17
Posted 2003-03-10

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.