The Neocon Non-Establishment

By: Joel v.d. Reijden | Expanded draft: Sep. 22, 2024 | Original: November 5, 2011

Contents

Intro

Earlier we discussed ISGP's Three Establishment Model: liberal-globalist, conservative(-nationalist) and Zionist, in which it was pointed out that the conservative establishment not only serves as controlled opposition for the globalist one, but also that it strongly turned towards Israel in the late 1970s. This model is based on an analysis of 2,000 important NGOs around the world and, as demonstrated throughout the site, works very well. However, maybe, as an additional test, we could look at the popular idea that the neoconservatives formed their own "establishment" and "took over" the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11 - and see how it fits into this Three Establishment Model.

^The media: rise of the "neocons" post-9/11

So, who remembers it? All the talk in the wake of 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror about the "neocon takeover" of American foreign policy? A hawkish policy in no small part aimed at fighting and overthrowing all the enemies of Israel?

This view was strongly promoted in both the mainstream and "new left" media: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, BBC, New York Observer, the New Statesman, the San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Monthly, etc., etc. - they all wrote their articles on the "neocons", from discussing their decades-long past tying even into communist support, to their responsibility for the Iraq quagmire, to worries that Iran might be their next target. 1 Popular conspiracy disinformers on the left, from 911-no-planer Peter Dale Scott 2 to RFK, Jr., who has been spreading disinformation about the death of his own father, have attacked the neocons. 3 Also "alt-right", "anti-establishment" conspiracy disinformers, Alex Jones at the top, have done the same, sometimes for decades. 4 The word "neocoon" has been dropped more than once - and makes this author laugh every time.

In that sense conspiracy disinformers on the left and right do not differ much from the mainstream media when the latter made observations as the "virtual takeover of the Bush administration's foreign policy" by "neocons". 5

1997-2000: PNAC's "neocon" letters and papers

Lets' back up a litle bit and discuss things in more detail.

The predominant "neocon" institute remembered in history is the 1997-founded Project for the New American Century (PNAC). PNAC received funding from the usual "Eastern Establishment"-tied "conservative CIA" foundations as Bradley and Scaife, and to a lesser extent Olin, the Mellon-tied Donner Foundation and others. 6 Signers of PNAC's 'Statement of Principles' included:

1. Jeb Bush
2. Dick Cheney
3. Dan Quayle: Bush 41 v.p.
4. Donald Rumsfeld
5. Paul Wolfowitz
6. Scooter Libby
7. Zalmay Khalilzad
8. Steve Forbes
9. Paula Dobriansky
10. Frank Gaffney
11. Donald Kagan
12. Elliott Abrams 7

The only big names missing here at this point are Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and maybe John Bolton. They would join soon enough. This June 3, 1997 'Statement of Principles' read:

"Conservatives have not confidently advanced a strategic vision of America's role in the world. ... They have not fought for a defense budget that would maintain American security and advance American interests in the new century [to maintain] American global leadership." 8

In January 1998 PNAC sent a letter to President Clinton, explaining that "the policy of "containment"" surrounding Saddam Hussein was failing, because the Clinton Administration's policy allowed Hussein to circumvent United Nations inspections for nuclear weapons. Instead, PNAC urged the Clinton administration to put its "attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power." 9

By May 1998 PNAC realized that its first letter hasn't had any effect on the Clinton administration. Therefore it wrote another letter, this time to Congressman Newt Gingrich and Senator Trent Lott. This second letter read:

"The Clinton administration ... not only rejected this advice but, as we warned, has begun to abandon its own policy of containment. [Instead] U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place." 10

Letter signers in the Iraq case included Richard Perle, PNAC director John Bolton, former CIA director R. James Woolsey and already familiar names as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as Robert Zoellick, and the usual host of Jewish neocons.

Another frequently-cited PNAC report, especially with regard to foreknowledge of 9/11, is the September 2000 report 'Rebuilding America's Defenses', and most notably this sentence:

"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." 11

This sentence is generally implied to refer to a political transformation, in line with another often-cited sentence, this time by Zbigniew Brzezinski, that went, "Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization..." 12 The thing is though, PNAC's "process of transformation"-line referred to a military transformation, and really cannot, or barely, be used to indicate any foreknowledge of 9/11. Put in proper context, it reads:

"Without increased spending on basic research and development the United States will be unable to exploit the RMA [Revolution in Military Affairs] and preserve its technological edge on future battlefields. ...

"The process of [military] transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions." 13

In other words, if China, Russia, or some other hostile country attacked the United States with some type of high technology - be it a stealth missile, drone, or some other type of weapon - that the United States cannot stop, only then will there be a rapid military transformation in military affairs.

The 2000 PNAC report 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' actually is interesting to read almost a quarter century later, with HIMARS, hypersonic missiles, and drone technology all having had their first major "transformational" or "revolutionary" successes on the battlefield since the Russo-Ukrainian War that started in 2022. Also let's not forget the reusable launch vehicles introduced by SpaceX in 2015. In its Part V, the PNAC report advocated for he following military changes:

1. Continue to develop, "HIMARS [to] replace forward-based heavy forces [while at the same time] the Army should develop ways to deploy and maneuver against adversaries with improved long-range strike capabilities."
2. Conversion kits as JDAM are necessary to turn dumb bombs into smart bombs.
3. Continue to develop anti-missile missiles as THAAD and Patriot.
4. A need to "develop other strike weaponry beyond current-generation Tomahawk cruise missiles..."


5. Complete the planned F-22 procurements, even though it likely is too expensive an aircraft to have been developed.
6. Abandon the Joint Strike Fighter (F-35) program.
7. Invest in "precision munitions and developing new ones..."
8. Replace these with the production of "large-bodied stealthy aircraft for ... lift, refueling, and other support missions as well as strike missions."
9. Invest much more in drone technology, both stealth and non-stealth, for surveillance, air-to-ground, air-to-air, and long-range support missions.
10. Invest in space technology, such as "inexpensive launch vehicles, new satellites and transatmospheric vehicles," etc. (p. 64)
11. "Control of space and cyberspace." (51, 57)


12. The Navy's focus needs to be turned away from littoral waters, back to dominating the open seas, where they will be less vulnerable in the future.
13. Limiting investments in carriers, due to their increased vulnerability through satellite access, drones, and missile technology, one example involving "China’s acquisition of ... supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles [which] will complicate U.S. surface fleet operations."
14. Move to "network-centric" warfare instead of "platform-centric" warfare (such as carriers), creating as many "nodes on the net" as possible. Underwater drones and "missile pods" to be left behind are examples of this.
15. More submarines and a wide variety of stealthy surface ships are desired. 14

All in all, the PNAC reports in general are not bad at all. Far from it. At least this author agrees with most of what was written. The major problem, of course, is that these are just words. American conservatives in general are experts at promoting pollution, waste, corruption and cartel-forming, because they always try to get rid of all checks and balances on government: no or ultra-low taxes, no social security, no healthcare, no minimum wage, no maximum work hours, no building codes, nothing. It's all Milton Friedman-type economic fascism. 15

2001: PNAC takes over the U.S. government, and soon forces through the Iraq invasion for oil and WMD reasons

The following PNAC signers and directors ended up in government from January 2001, with the 9/11 conspiracy taking place on September 11, 2001:

1. The Bush family: Jeb Bush signed PNAC's founding 'Statement of Principles' in 1997. Jeb's brother, George W. Bush, was U.S. president from January 2001 to January 2009.
2. Donald Rumsfeld: Secretary of defense Jan. 2001 - Dec. 2006.
3. Paul Wolfowitz: Deputy secretary of defense March 2001 - June 2005.
4. John Bolton: Under secretary of state for Arms Control and International Security Affairs May 2001 - July 2005. Ambassador to the United Nations 2005-2006.
5. Elliott Abrams: Deputy national security advisor under Stephen Hadley Feb. 2005 - Jan. 2009.
6. Dick Cheney: U.S. vice president from January 2001 to January 2009.
7. Scooter Libby: Cheney's chief of staff and national security advisor Jan. 2001 - Oct. 2005.
8. Dov Zakheim: Comptroller of the Department of Defense May 2001 - July 2004.
9. Richard Perle: Member Defense Policy Board 1996-2005, chair 2001-2003.


10. Zalmay Khalilzad: Born in Afghanistan. In the 1970s he studied at the University of Chicago under Albert Wohlstetter, also the mentor of Perle, Wolfowitz and Ahmed Chalabi. 16 Assistant professor of political science at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs 1979-1989, working closely with Trilateral Commission founder and Jimmy Carter national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Signed PNAC's 'Statement of Principles' on June 3, 1997. Signed PNAC's 1998 letter 'Milosevic is the Problem'. Signed PNAC's two "Iraq War" letters of January and May 1998. Ambassador to Afghanistan 2004-2005. Ambassador to Iraq 2005-2007. U.S. special representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation 2018-2021.


11. Ahmed Chalabi: Born in Baghdad, in one of Iraq's oldest and dominant banking, merchant and political families, in 1945. His family fled Iraq after the 1958 assassination of the Hashemite king Faisal II. Remained close in later decades to the Hashemite royal family ruling Jordan, but eventually, in the mnid 1990s, ended up here with a conviction for bank fraud. Studied at the University of Chicago under Albert Wohlstetter, also a mentor to Perle, Wolfowitz and Khalilzad. 17 Recruited by the CIA in 1991 and co-founded his anti-Saddam Hussein Iraqi National Congress with CIA coordination in 1992. 18 Over the years this Iraqi National Congress was funded by U.S. congress 19 and reportedly also by PNAC itself. 20
    
    It was Chalabi who provided some of the bogus evidence to justify the Iraq invasion of March 2003. 21 The neocons favored him, because Chalabi claimed that once installed in power in Iraq, he could open up diplomatic relations with Israel and allow contracts to be set up and pipelines to be build in favor of western companies. 22 In October 2002, according to oil industry sources, "officials from the White House, the Department of Defense and the State Department", including Dick Cheney staffers, met with executives of ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips and Halliburton to discuss contracts in post-Saddam Iraq. Coincidentally, on November 3, 2002, it came out that Ahmed Chalabi "has met executives of three US oil multinationals to negotiate the carve-up of Iraq's massive oil reserves post-Saddam." The Cheney-tied meeting was denied 23, while the companies Chalabi met with were kept secret 24, but it may well have involved the exact same meeting. In this same period Russia, France and China expressed worries of being forced out Iraq after an invasion. 25
    
    By 2004 Chalabi was accused by an increasing amount of people of "double crossing" his long-time neocon friends in favor of cozying up to an Ayatollah-ruled Iran, purely out of self-interest. 26 Despite that, Chalabi still became president of the Governing Council of Iraq under Paul Bremer from September 1 to September 30, 2003, and deputy prime minister of Iraq and minister of oil in 2005 and 2006. Distrusted by many, he never was able to become prime minister of Iraq.

As the reader can see, Ahmed Chalabi may not have been a PNAC signer, but he was part of the PNAC network, and for decades also involved with PNAC's founders. His use by the PNAC clique really drives home how much the 2003 Iraq invasion was about controlling the second-largest oil supplies in the world. The oil motive actually goes back to the very start of the Bush administration, well before 9/11. Already in April 2001 vice president Dick Cheney, as head of the Bush government's Energy Task Force, had commissioned a joint CFR and James Baker Institute study entitled 'Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century'. It read:

"The United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to ... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets. Therefore the US should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments." 27

James Baker was the Texas friend of President George H. W. Bush, back from his family's oil days. Baker came to serve under Bush as secretary of state and chief of staff in the 1989-1993 period. Others involved in the task force were Enron's Kenneth Lay, ChevronTexaco CEO David O'Reilly, senior leadership of Shell and BP, and a former Kuwaiti oil minister. Cheney, of course, had been CEO of Halliburton - an oil industry products and services provider - in the 1990s.

Secondly though, it also is clear that all the Jewish neocons involved in PNAC and the subsequent Bush invasion, wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein for fear he would be able to blackmail or attack Israel with weapons of mass destruction in the near future. We see this agenda very clearly described in the 1996 report 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm', written by emerging PNAC signer and Defense Science Board member Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, who, as under secretary of defense for policy from July 2001 to August 2005, would come run the Office of Special Plans, an outfit that manipulated "evidence" to "prove" a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, some of the evidence coming from Chalabi. 28 The 1996 report reads:

"Labor Zionism, which for 70 years has dominated the Zionist movement, has generated a stalled and shackled economy. ... Netanyahu’s government comes in with a new set of [neoliberal] ideas. ...

"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions...

"The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf, Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria." 29

Again, the report doesn't sound "irrational" or "immoral" at all. The problems are the extreme neoliberal economic measures, the wasting of trillions of dollars of (american) public funds, the questionable allegiances, and the deception of the (American) public.

What we can say with a large degree of certainty though is that the 2003 Iraq invasion was pushed through for two main reasons:

1. Control over Iraq's oil reserves, to prevent Saddam from blackmailing the West with them.
2. Getting rid of any potential weapons of mass destruction threat, especially to Israel, but also an objective of the U.S.
3. Reducing the power of Israel's enemies as Iran, Syria and Hezbollah.

Looking at this amalgam of reasons, it appears the old CIA-Mossad partnership in (big business) coup-plotting and apparently the drug trade also came together to arrange for the invasion of Iraq.

This still leaves the question though: what exactly is a "neocon"?

^PNAC was not exclusively neocon: "liberal CIA" there too

Anyone who looks at the names of PNAC will recognize a lengthy list of Jewish scholars, but also a number of non-Jewish Republicans and conservatives, plus a peculiar former Democrat former CIA director in the form of R. James Woolsey.

However, PNAC's 1998 letter to get rid of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic also was signed by the following three individuals with deep ties to George Soros 30:

1. Morton Abramowitz: Member CFR 1975-. Ambassador to Thailand 1978-1981. Assistant secretary of state for Intelligence and Research 1985-1989. Ambassador to Turkey 1989-1991. Trustee Carnegie Endowment 1991-1997. Visitor Davos in 1993 and 1995. Founding trustee of George Soros' International Crisis Group from 1995 until 2017, when he became trustee emeritus. Member of the Executive Panel of the Chief of Naval Operations 1997-1998. Member of the super-elite Bretton Woods Committee from at least 1999 to 2015. Trustee of George Soros' "liberal CIA" Open Society Foundations from at least 2000, until 2002. Board member of elite CIA front Freedom House until 1999 and the National Endowment for Democracy from 2000 to 2004.


2. Morton Halperin: Member CFR 1968-. Director of the "liberal CIA", IPS-associated group Center for National Security Studies (CNSS) 1975-1992, followed by the position of advisory board chair. Co-chair of the anti-CIA 'Covert Operations and Decision Making' committee that was part of the CNSS' founding. Project director of the ACLU- and CNSS-sponsored Project on National Security and Civil Liberties. Fellow "liberal CIA" MacArthur Foundation 1985-1991. Created the Washington office of George Soros' "liberal CIA" Open Society Foundations (OSF) and appointed director of it in Feb. 2002, until at least 2009. Also a senior advisor to OSF. Long-time member of the 2002-founded Collegium International, a think with countless former heads of state. Senior vice president and director of fellows of the Center for American Progress (CAP), which was at the center of the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, with George Soros a major CAP financier.


3. Ed Turner: Executive vice president of CNN, owned by globalist, new age, "liberal CIA"-funding billionaire Ted Turner, who is not related to him. Ed Turner was one of Ted's first chief aides. Ed was a trustee of George Soros' International Crisis Group from at least 1996 to November 1999. He died in 2002.

Morton Abramowitz also signed a 2002 PNAC letter in favor of defending Hong Kong from China.

This, of course, raises the question why polar opposites - upcoming, pro-Israel "neocon" Bush administration officials and anti-Israel, anti-conservative Soros employees - decided to associate themselves with each other. While these people are not in the habit of inviting actual "outsiders", this association remains fascinating.

Chief "neocon" whistleblower General Wesley Clark: "Seven countries in five years"

Looking at the hopelessly propagandist TikTok feeds of the 2020s, probably one of the more time-persistent remnants of this Bush administration era - and also as one of the chief sources - was the "Seven countries in five years" warning of General Wesley Clark. After a visit to the Pentagon about ten days after 9/11, he was informed about a favored neocon strategy:

"On or about the 20th of September [2001] ... about 10 days after 9/11, I went to the Pentagon. I saw secretary [of defense Donald] Rumsfeld and deputy secretary [of defense Paul] Wolfowitz. I went downstairs, just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me. And one of the generals called me [into his office]. ... "We've made the decision to go to war with Iraq. ... I don't know [why]. ... No, no, there's nothing new that way [in that we still can't tie Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.]"

"I came back to see him a few weeks later. By that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And he said, "Oh, it's worse than that. ... I just got this down from upstairs, [from] the secretary of defense's office, today. This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran." 31

This quote comes from a 2007 interview of Clark by none other than Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, the "new left", "liberal CIA" outfit heavily financed by the Ford Foundation, and which has also received funding from Soros and other foundations. While the memo in question was classified and has never been seen by the public, Clark has been heavily talking about this subject since 2003, when he made a failed run for U.S. president. He always gave the same basic story with a few additional details:

1. He met Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in 1991, with Scooter Libby opening the door for him. At the time Wolfowitz served as under secretary of defense for policy under secretary of defense Dick Cheney, in the George H. W. Bush administration. Clark asked if Wolfowitz was happy with the outcome of the (first) Gulf War. To Clark's surprise, Wolfowitz was disappointed that Bush hadn't fully invaded Iraq and gotten rid of Saddam Hussein. On top of that, Wolfowitz stated he wanted to "clean up" Syria, headed by the Assad regime; and Iran, ruled by the Ayatollahs; "before the next great superpower comes along". 32


2. On the 20th of September, 2001, days after 9/11, Clark visited secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz. George W. Bush was U.S. president at the time and Dick Cheney vice president. During the meeting with Rumsfeld, Clark was shocked by Rumsfeld's callousness: "No one is gonna tell us where and when we can bomb. Nobody." 33 This was followed by more shocks that certainly Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz - despite not any clear ties to Al Qaeda and 9/11 - once again were plotting to "go to war" with Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as Libya under Gaddafi, Sudan under Omar Al-Bashir, and an additional focus on terrorism harbor Lebanon and Islamic Somalia.


3. Clark did not complain about the Bush administration's Afghanistan invasion: "We attacked Afghanistan. I was pretty happy about that. We should have." 34 He did not start complaining about the "policy coup" 35 until the time of the March 2003 Iraq invasion, which, in addition, he explained, was promoted in the "neoconservative press". 36


4. In 2007, again looking to run for president of the United States, Clark set up the website StopIranWar.com. 37 In one the site's first posts he warned about "neoconservatives who don't understand the limitations of military power in achieving political ends", suggesting the "clipping the wings of these madmen" before they are "are going to kill us all". 38

It's not all untrue what Clark said. Far from it. The case could easily be made that the persons fingered as "neocons" are hawkish to the point one has to worry about self-destruction. Also, in 2007, Clark predicted the rise of ISIS, saying if the U.S. would leave Iraq prematurely, the Saudis would start financing Sunni Iraqi terrorist groups to counter Iran, leading to the possibility of the rise of a "superpowerful Sunni extremist group". 39 The major question, of course, is why the Bush administration "neocons" didn't see the rise of Shia influence in post-invasion Iraq. Arguably they spent trillions of dollars of public funds to the benefit of few billion in oil company profits, but without any real solution in sight for the region.

Wesley Clark: Soros-Kissinger-Brzezinski ally

In any case, here we have General Wesley Clark taking centerstage in the campaign against the hawkish agenda of the neoconservatives that dominate the Bush administration. There are a few anomalies though with Clark. One is that Clark himself has been considered a bit of a "neoconservative" - or bully - in his own high level military past, from alleged behavior as head of USSOUTHCOM in 1996-1997 to the 1999 Pristina airport incident in Kosovo in which he and fellow Bilderberger Javier Solona - then NATO secretary general - could well have started World War III with the Russians. 40 It certainly must be said that Clark's "shock observations" about the "outlier" views of these neocons are naive to the point of unbelievability:

"The purpose of the military is to start war and change governments? It is not sort of to deter conflict. We're gonna invade countries?" 41

So who really is General Wesley Clark? Apart from his official military positions? Let's see:

1. West Point graduate.


2. MA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) in 1968 from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.


3. Graduated Ranger School and went to Vietnam afterwards.


4. 1975 White House fellow working under President Ford's chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld 42, a future top "neocon" who was a CFR member in the 1974-1979 period. The U.S. vice president at the time was Nelson Rockefeller, with Nelson's old protege, Henry Kissinger, as secretary of state and former national security advisor, also as head of the secretive 40 Committee, dominating foreign policy and CIA covert operatons. 43 Ford himself was an old member of the controversial Warren Commission, investigating the JFK assassination, alongside David Rockefeller friend, former CIA director Allen Dulles; and David Rockefeller mentor and CFR chair John J. McCloy.


5. Member CFR 1983-.


6. Annual visitor Munich Security Conference from at least 1999 until 2003.


7. Speaker at the Commonwealth Club of California in 1999, 2001 and 2007, the last time speaking out against the "neocons".


8. "Distinguished senior adviser" at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) from September 2000 on, where Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski sat on various boards for decades, still dominating the group in the 2000s. 44


9. Among the longest-serving U.S. trustees of the far-less-U.S.-centered International Crisis Group from mid 2000 45 until 2018 46, all these years together with the group's founder, George Soros. Also on the board during much of this period was Zbigniew Brzezinski. 47


10. From 2001 to 2005 he was a director of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) - which began as a privatized CIA front for the Democrat and Republican parties - from 2001 to 2005, together with elites as Lee Hamilton, Richard Holbrooke, Morton Abramowitz, Frank Carlucci, and others. Henry Kissinger (1985-1989) and Zbigniew Brzezinski (1988-1997) used to be board members of the NED as well, as were (neo)conservatives Steve Forbes (1994-1999) and Paul Wolfowitz (1994-2001).


11. No later than August 2001, Clark was a trustee of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, a group dominated by traditional "Atlantic elitists", but also with some neocons and Israel lobby individuals on board as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Pipes and Kenneth Bialkin. Centered around George Kennan, the father of the Cold War "containment" policy, it has awarded persons as David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger (also a honorary chair in the 1990s) and George Shultz. 48

We could continue with globalist think tank positions for later years, but it should be clear that General Wesley Clark never was any kind of independent player, "outsider", or "whistleblower" when he warned the world about the "neocons". This is a person involved at that very moment in globalist think tanks with Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and quite literally employed by George Soros - the "new left" polar opposite of the neocons - at the International Crisis Group. It all makes little sense. And at the very least we can conclude that some kind of globalist roleplay is going on.

^Pro-Iraq War versus anti-Iraq War stances amongst elites

Other elitists have roughly supported the claims of General Wesley Clark. Richard Haass, a Rhodes scholar who was the director of Policy Planning at the State Department in 2001-2003 and subsequently, from 2003 to 2023, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, explained that he became aware that vice president Dick Cheney, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld already had convinced President Bush to go to war with Iraq by July 2002:

"There was nothing imminent, nothing that was particularly new, so I didn't see any vital national interests. Nevertheless, the administration decided to go to war. I found this out in July of 2002, nine months before the war began... Guys on my staff, women on my staff said, "Something is going on... all the people working for the vice president [Dick Cheney], the national security advisor [Condoleezza Rice] and the secretary of defense [Donald Rumsfeld] are too happy. ...

"Condi [then] said [me], "Richard, save your breath. It has already been decided." This is early July 2002. So I go back to the State Department and I called my boss, Colin [Powell]. Guess what? He said, "No way. Can't be. You misread your girlfriend." ... A few days later he says, "You know, you're right." ... What is extra-ordinary is that all of this happened without there ever being a formal meeting in the Bush administration about whether to go to war." 49

What is important to note here is that certainly Haass and Rice weren't bitter enemies. Zbigniew Brzezinksi described Haass as Rice's "colleague and friend on the National Security Council" from the 1990s. 50 Colin Powell, as can be seen above, joked to Haass, "You misread your girlfriend", after he informed Powell about the apparent decision to go to war with Iraq. 51 Haass' claims that the Iraq War had nothing to do with oil and profits, or with Israel, are questionable as well. 52 Haass is a Jew, by the way.

Opposition to the Iraq War and the neocons is a fascinating issue. Almost all senior American politicians and elites unequivocably supported the Iraq invasion. The only mild and less mild opposition to the Iraq invasion (and not the Afghanistan invasion) came from the "diplomacy"/"equilibrium"-obsessed Kissinger clique, an Israel-hating Zbigniew Brzezinski and the equally Israel-hating George Soros circles. Let's look at the dividing lines on the Iraq issue from 2001-2003, because it's clear it wasn't just a "Jewish neocon" issue:

Pro-Iraq invasion - Bush administration:

1. Condoleezza Rice 53: A key George Shultz protege and Bush national security advisor.
2. Dick Cheney: U.S. vice president.
3. Donald Rumsfeld 54: Secretary of defense 2001-2006.
4. Paul Wolfowitz: Deputy secretary of defense 2001-2005.
5. Douglas Feith: Under secretary of defense for policy 2001-2005. In September 2002 he and Wolfowitz founded the secret Office of Special Plans, which gathered intelligence and cherry-picked and manipulated any data that could be construed as Iraq having ties to Al Qaeda or working on weapons of mass destruction. Feith headed this office until June 2003, three months after the Iraq invasion. He and Wolfowitz briefed Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice with their manipulated data. These officials wanted the Office of Special Plans manipulations to be true, which pushed CIA analysts on the defense. 55 All this is literally a rehash of the "(neo)conservative" "Team B" group during the Cold War in 1975-1976, that was founded by Richard Perle and counted the involvement of Paul Wolfowitz. Team B just maximized the military threat of the Soviet Union in opposition to the CIA.
6. Richard Perle: Member of the Defense Policy Board 1996-2005, and chairman 2001-2003.
7. Paul Bremer.
8. Richard Boucher.

"Reluctantly" pro-Iraq invasion - Bush administration:

1. Colin Powell: Bush's secretary of state.

Anti-Iraq invasion - outside of the Bush administration:

1. Henry Kissinger. 56
2. Brent Scowcroft 57: A key Kissinger protege in government and as founding Kissinger Associates president.
3. Lawrence Eagleburger 58: A key Kissinger protege in government and as Kissinger Associates president who, despite being against an Iraq invasion, already in the hours after 9/11 stated on TV: "The Afghani government has a responsibility that is at least as great as Osama bin Laden's. And that means, I think, we must take military action against them [as well as] a number of states." 59
4. Zbigniew Brzezinski. 60
5. George Soros.
6. Gen. Wesley Clark.

Pro-Iraq invasion - Republicans outside of the Bush administration:

1. George Shultz. 61
2. James Woolsey: A former CIA director and the chief neocon U.S.-Israel NGO liaison, who one day after 9/11 went: "The prime candidate [with 9/11] would have to be, not proven, but would have to be Iraq." 62 Member Defense Policy Board with Richard Perle and various other "neocons" 2001-2005.
3. General Alexander Haig: An old right-wing Kissinger protege, Knight of Malta, and 1981-1982 Reagan secretary of state. As an international advisory board member of "conservative CIA" outlet Newsmax, by January 2002 Haig openly preferred going after Syria, Iraq and Iran. 63


4. Sen. John McCain: 64
5. Sen. Rick Santorum. 65
6. Sen. John Kyl. 66
7. Sen. Richard Lugar. 67
8. Sen. Mitch McConnell. 68
9. Sen. Arlen Specter. 69

Pro-Iraq invasion - Democrats outside of the Bush administration:

1. Sen. Hillary Clinton: 70 Democrat leader and senator 2001-2009, who on October 10, 2002 said to the Senate: "Unfortunately, during the 1980s, while he engaged in such horrific [torture and chemical warfare] activity, he enjoyed the support of the American government, because he had oil and was seen as a counterweight to the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. In 1991 Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait, losing the support of the United States. [Since inspectors were pushed out] Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock... and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members. ... Any vote that might lead to war should be hard, but I cast it with conviction." 71


2. Sen. Joe Biden: 72 Democrat Delaware senator from 1973 until becoming U.S. vice president in 2009. On October 10, 2002, with great conviction and even anger, he said to the Senate: "President Bush did not lash out precipitously at Iraq after 9/11. He did not snub the U.N. or our allies. He did not dismiss new inspection regimes. He did not ignore congress. At each pivotal moment, he has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation. And I believe he will continue to do so. ... In each case in my view, he has made the right, rational, and calm, deliberate decision... The reason [Saddam Hussein] poses a growing danger to the United States and its allies is that he *possesses* chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons. [Dismissive:] And-uh, unlike my colleague from West-Virginia and Maryland, I don't believe this is a rush to war. I believe it's a march to peace and security." 73


3. Sen. John Kerry: 74 A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee anno 2002. On October 9, 2002 he gave the Senate a long history of Hussein's war crimes, miscalculations and penchant for developing weapons of mass destruction. He continued, "We should not go to war because these things are in his past, but be prepared to go to war because of what they tell us about the future," followed by the lie, "We know through intelligence that not only he has kept them [the chemical cand biological weapons], but he continues to grow them." 75


4. Sen. Jay Rockefeller. 76 A nephew of David Rockefeller and a senator from West Virginia from 1985 to 2015, who served as vice chair and chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the years after 9/11. On October 10, 2002, Rockefeller held a speech on the Senate floor, saying: "The risk of doing nothing [is] too great to bear. There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. And could have it earlier if he is able to obtain fissle materials on the outside market. ... We have always underestimated the progress that Saddam has been able to make..." 77
5. Sen. Chuck Hagel. 78 A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee anno 2002, similar to John Kerry.
6. Sen. Dianne Feinstein: 79
7. Sen. Joseph Lieberman. 80
8. Sen. Harry Reid. 81
9. Sen. Chuck Schumer. 82
10. Sen. Bill Frist. 83
11. Sen. Tom Daschle. 84

So again, the "neocons" manipulated the United States into the Iraq War? Or better said, the "neocons" manipulated the Bush administration into pushing for the Iraq War? And then the Bush administration, with its questionable intelligence leaks, was able to convince Congress and the Senate into supporting the war? Even Democrat elites? Who under Obama maintained a similarly interventionist, "pro-neocon" foreign policy in the post-Bush era? Questionable as such a line of thinking may be, it certainly looks as if just about every influential senator with some significance in ISGP's Superclass Index, took the bait: hook, line and sinker.

Watching the Senate proceedings at the time and comparing it to the even more embarrassing TikTok ones of 2023, the scenery is quite recognizable. Fake, controlled opposition debates ruled the day, from questions as "Is he manufacturing these weapons of mass destruction for the defense of his sovereign nation?" 85 to what type of nuclear threat the U.S. or countries surrounding Iraq might be facing from Saddam 86, to questions if the U.S. should proceed with war if Saudi Arabia won't make bases available. Literally everyone was talking around the issue that the Bush administration's intelligence on Saddam's alleged nuclear weapons development program, or supposed ties to Al Qaeda, was flimsy at best - and all too convenient for a "neocon"-influenced administration hell-bent from the day of 9/11 to go to war with Iraq.

On June 5, 2008 Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Senator Jay Rockefeller put out the Committee's work demonstrating that President George W. Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of state Colin Powell and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice all had conspired to lie about Iraq having ties to Al Qaeda, having weapons of mass destruction, in particular nuclear ones; and about various other aspects, including having exaggerated how welcome an American liberation would be. Rockefeller's words:

"Just to be clear, there is no doubt that we all relied on flawed intelligence. But there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully supported by intelligence. ... It's about the most heinous type of activity that I can think of: it's taking intelligence which you know not to be true, and then persuing it. ...

"And I'm gonna give an example and that is the enriched uranium. This was a REALLY big deal on all the Sunday shows, with the president, the vice president and everybody else, Condi Rice, all of them, repeating, repeating, repeating, "Avoid the mushroom cloud. Saddam is preparing a nuclear weapon. And he is getting enriched uranium."

"The fact of the matter was, he wasn't. ... The fact of the matter is if he was trying to get it - which he wasn't - from Niger, he couldn't have gotten it from Niger, because all their yellow cake, which he was seeking, is controlled by the French government, and they would not have allowed it to happen. And beyond that, he already had 500,000 pounds of yellow cake in Iraq. But they turned this sort of sequence of absolute untruthers into scaring the American people. [They were] saying something that was entirely unsubstantiated, which they knew... and that had the gall to try and pawn it off on British intelligence. ...

"[Cites his own report:] "Statements and implications by the president and the secretary of state suggesting that Iraq and Al Qaeda had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided Al Qaeda with weapons of training, were not substantiated by the intelligence. ... Statements by the president and the vice president indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist group for attacks against the United States, were contradicted by available, at that time, intelligence information." ... So much was not based on intelligence. They simply didn't care about that. They disdained the intelligence community. ...

""Statements by the president and the vice president prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemicial weapons production capabilities and activities, did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties whether such production was ongoing. But boy, did they put it forward. The secretary of defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated an underground weapons of mass destruction facility that was buried so deep that it was not vulnerable to missile or other attack - uh, [that] was not substantiated by available intelligence and information. The intelligence community did not confirm that Mohammed Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 is a very important point."" They made much of that. Talked about it constantly. And yet the facts are all to the other side. He wasn't even out of the country - this country." 87

As any top-notch politician, Senator Jay Rockefeller really did his best to sound shocked and angry about all the misleading the Bush government had been doing. The real question, of course, is how Rockefeller himself supposedly was so convinced by the Bush administration's non-evidence in 2002 that he voted in favor of an attack on Iraq with the argument, "There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons..." Even much later, on February 5, 2003, in front of the United Nations, all Colin Powell showed were a few pixelated satellite photos that could mean anything. The rest was just posturing. All the intelligence reports Senator Rockefeller discredited in 2008 never were credible at an earlier date, because they just consisted of random bits and pieces of speculation that never came to form a coherent story. This author, as a naive 20-year-old, literally was laughing and rolling his eyes back in February 2003 upon seeing Colin Powell's U.N. speech: "They sure are desperate to invade Iraq, aren't they?"

So why was Senator Rockefeller so convinced in 2002-2003 that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons? Or Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and John Kerry for that matter? Of course, they weren't. They were just towing the expected line, similar to any senator who was anyone within the globalist think tank network, or who turned out to have a career in front of them in terms of future presidential candidacies or senior cabinet positions. That also helps explain why even Senator Rockefeller admitted that it had taken forever to produce the report in question, and why, despite his harsh languague, even saying the Bush administration was "rotting" the democratic process in other ways with its lies, absolutely, staunchly opposed criminal prosecution procedures. In fact, he specifically had to be asked about it when he tried to walk off at the end of the press conference. Next he misunderstood the question: "Do I endorse this report?" His staffer corrected him: "No, criminal prosecution", after which Rockefeller sternly went:

"Oh no, I'm not into that. ["Why not"?] Well, one, because you'd love it so much. [*Laughter*] Second, it would mean [that] nothing else, whether it's clean air or uh, whatever, FISA, would get done. In other words, if you press for that, it's like pressing for impeachment. It's a grand act! Uhm, with only, you know, five or six months to go. But it's a futile act. And it's a wrong act. Because we do have business to do. And, you know, should it be done? In the wide sweep of history? Yes. Should it be now by us, now? No!" 88

So, in other words: let's not prosecute criminal behavior of the entire Bush administration that cost the U.S. trillions of dollars and caused thousands of dead and mutilated U.S. soldiers in a war that still was not at its end... because it's inconvenient for the Democrat-Republican relationship? And because the Bush administration will be out of power by late January 2009, not 5-6 months, but almost 8 months later? This makes zero sense, of course: it will result in exactly what Senator Rockefeller was claiming during the press conference that he tried to prevent: a repeat of the type of behavior of the Bush administration.

Of course, anybody familiar with senior bureaucrats - which this author has increasingly been - immediately recognizes the roleplays and sugar-coated lies and cover ups. Judges, prosecutors, Superior Court lawyers and politicians - at least over here in the Netherlands - shamelessly engage in this behavior all day whenever they need to protect "the system", to the point of disappearing and ignoring every possible document and secret audio recording. (The author has privately already written a book on that). All their "opposition" is just "play" with unspoken limits to the public debate. And they know they can get away with it, because neither the media nor any colleagues of theirs will hold them accountable. The senior levels of government are a stranglehold: you shut your mouth and go along, or you get out. You do the exact opposite of what a pressured criminal does: you make no deals and you don't inform on anyone, no matter the evidence against you. As long as you shut your youth, you get protected.

In any case, there was no reason for Senator Rockefeller to try and prosecute the Bush family, vice president Dick Cheney, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of state Colin Powell and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, because they are all major playors in the globalist think tank network. They are meant to play their roles and stay above the law. A Donald Trump, despite being "conservative CIA", they would have immediately tried to impeach and prosecute. If fact, he wouldn't even have gotten away with any warmongering, because the media wouldn't have played along. So it's all a silly game of insider corruption. Even if Bush government officials were to be convicted, they would likely be pardoned by a future administration, similar to how President George H. W. Bush in 1992 pardoned his former Reagan government colleagues Robert McFarlane, Caspar Weinberger and Elliott Abrams, as well as various senior CIA officials involved in Iran-Contra and BCCI scandals. 89 They all got away with that too. The holes in the report of the Bush-appointed elite 9/11 Commission? Same story.

Kissinger the "anti-neocon" - while his buddy George Shultz fielded them

In the previous section we saw that it were the "Rockefeller Republican" Henry Kissinger, the "Rockefeller Democrat" Zbigniew Brzezinski and the "new left" "Social Democrat" George Soros being among the minority within the globalist elite who expressed reservations or outright opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion. Then we had "Reagan Republican" George Shultz who was in favor. There are more questions to be raised, because all of these men were close friends and allies of David Rockefeller for decades-on-end through the CFR and Trilateral Commission, as well as successive Democrat and Republican administrations. In other words, their "division" is not particularly credible, and also peculiar enough to address, because Kissinger and his "detente" policy have always been the ultimate two enemies of the (neo)conservatives, while Shultz quite literally injected the neoconservatives into the Bush administration.

Henry Kissinger and George Shultz shared membership in many globalist think tanks and met each other on many different occasions. Countless pictures of them together exist, even from the Bush, Obama and Trump administration eras, also at the White House. Kissinger has publicly fawned over Shultz since his second set of memoirs that were published on January 1, 1982, six months before Shultz moved from the Bechtel presidency to become Reagan's secretary of state; with Bechtel's immediate past vice president, Caspar Weinberger, already having been appointed Reagan's secretary of defense at that point:

"I met no one in public life for whom I developed greater respect and affection. ... He became the dominant member of every committee he joined. ... If I could choose one American to whom I would entrust the nation’s fate in a crisis, it would be George Shultz." 90

George Shultz has similarly been close to David Rockefeller through the University of Chicago since 1967, the CFR, the Bohemian Grove and the U.S.-USSR Trade and Economic Council since the 1970s. He actually served as a CFR director under chairman David Rockefeller in 1980-1982, before becoming Reagan's long-time secretary of state; and was involved in David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission and the new age-globalist State of the World Forum with the likes of David Rockefeller, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ted Turner in the 1990s. Despite the liberal-globalist ties and a cheerful personality, also in the post-9/11 era Shultz continued to play the stone-cold, right-wing Reaganite without any apparent humor when making statements as the following:

"You remember the Dow Chemical Company? It’s a fine chemical company. They made napalm, which the Defense Department wanted. I suppose it’s a perfectly honorable thing in America to run a company that produces something that the Defense Department wants to buy. However, in the Vietnam atmosphere, they were very unpopular on campuses... [Professor] Hans Morgenthau gave a speech about the terrible things of napalm and Vietnam and so, but we had the [opposition] interviews. Freedom of speech prevailed. ...

"It [also] was the first time that Henry Kissinger realized that economics was important because he saw how destabilizing this was." 91

A first interesting thing to mention is that "the lefty" Hans Morgenthau, soon after these events, was to be found as a "fellow member" of the ultraright Hudson Institute, alongside Henry Kissinger, Milton Friedman, and a list of emerging neocons, with both Nelson Rockefeller and his son Rodman playing important roles in the institute.

As for the speech, in this case Shultz quite literally used the production of napalm in a questionable war as an example of Milton Friedman's concept of "freedom". Friedman was a proponent of the most radical form of neoliberalism and libertarism: no maximum working hours, no minimum wages, no laws for such (essential) things as building codes, etc. 92 With that, Friedman (and Shultz) contrasted with "the left" - and even David Rockefeller, who criticized the "Friedman Doctrine" and argued in favor of various forms of "corporate social responsibility". 93 The "Friedman Doctrine" became particularly well known in 1970 when a Milton Friedman-penned New York Times headline read, 'The [Only] Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits [for the Shareholders]'. 94 Both actually became key contrasting philosophies on Wall Street. This aspect is discussed at some length in ISGP's Three Establishment Model article.

Ironically, post-9/11, George Shultz defined "neoconservatism", and effectively its whole global War on Terror, also in terms of Milton Friedman-type "freedom"-spreading. It appears that every aspect of the policies he has been pushing revolves around this concept, similar to how Kissinger always talked about things as "equilibrium" and "world order":

"I don't know how you define 'neoconservatism', but I think it's associated with trying to spread open political systems and democracy. I recall President Reagan's Westminster speech in 1982—that communism would be consigned to ‘the ash heap of history' and that freedom was the path ahead. And what happened? Between 1980 and 1990 [during Reagan], the number of countries that were classified as ‘free' or ‘mostly free' increased by about 50 percent. Open political and economic systems have been gaining ground... I don't know whether that's neoconservative or what it is, but I think it's what has been happening. I'm for it." 95

Shultz' preference for pro-Israel neoconservatism makes sense, as in the 1980s, as Reagan's secretary of state, he developed among the closest ties to Israel of any top person in the Superclass Index. James Woolsey, certainly since 9/11, has many more of these ties, but Shultz's ties started much earlier: going back to his friendship with future Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the mid 1980s, followed by overseeing the neoliberal reform of the Israeli economy, all of which brought Shultz into the radical CIA-Mossad and MI6-tied Zionist and pro-Israel network of the Jonathan Institute, named after Benjamin Netanyahu's slain brother.

The article in which Shultz was cited was published by the heavily conservative-oriented Hoover Institution, the long-time home of Shultz and, since 2013, Henry Kissinger as well. It was aptly called 'George Shultz, Father of the Bush Doctrine'. After all, it was George Shultz, with his protege Condoleezza Rice, who invited Governor George W. Bush to Shultz's Stanford office, and surrounded him with neoconservatives as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle to build Bush's foreign policy - were he to be elected. 96

In reality, the "neoconservative" Shultz and Friedman economic and political doctrines cannot function long-term by themselves without being balanced out by concepts promoted by elitist friends as the Rockefeller Republican, the Clinton Democrat, or a Jimmy Carter and George Soros-type Social Democrat. And these elements certainly have fielded their opposition - or "opposition" - to the Shultz- and Friedman-inspired "Bush Doctrine". George Soros has been the most prominent aspect of that. The heavy funding of anything from the Democracy Alliance to MoveOn.org, and the latter's subsequent support for Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' - which after 30 minutes very abruptly switched from questioning 9/11 to questioning the Iraq invasion - is exactly what first made George Soros notorious.

Traditional liberal-globalist Zbigniew Brzezinski, coming from an more "elite" perspective, has not been quiet either. In his 2009 analysis of the change between Bush 41 and Bush 43, he correctly pointed out that the former was much more traditionally anti-Israel, a view that Brzezinski - as a top pro-Third World immigration globalist - shared. 97 In 2009 Brzezinski even suggested "a Liberty in reverse" if Israel would try to fly over U.S.-controlled Iraqi airspace to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, a reference to Israel's 1967 non-so-accidental attack on the U.S.S. Liberty. 98

Neither Brzezinski nor Soros, nor anyone else really, has focused on the fact that a (fellow) Trilateral Commission member, George Shultz, largely fielded "the neocons" though, individuals these elites also were already familiar with for many years. In fact, a former Washington Post and Los Angeles Times journalist named James Mann is the only one to have focused on the Shultz aspect in his 2004 book 'Rise of the Vulcans'. Guess who joined the Kissinger- and Brzezinski-dominated CSIS in October 2001, one month after 9/11? That would be James Mann, as "Writer-in-Residence, International Security Program", right on the same panel and with the same function as the pre-9/11-appointed Kissinger protege Anthony Blinken 99, who two full decades later, in 2021, surfaced as President Joe Biden's secretary of state.

As always, no matter what side of the aisle someone is located, at the highest levels everybody knows everybody. It's a peculiar, hard-to-understand elite game, in which the average voter has no say, and doesn't even have a clue just how close the connections at the top are, even with political groups that supposedly hate and maximally oppose each other. This, of course, is why ISGP's various models are so important.

^"Neocons" as in "new Jewish conservatives" perfectly fits ISGP's models: including its controlled opposition aspect

Speaking of these models, in the 'Managed Democracy' article ISGP demonstrated the domination of David Rockefeller and friends - mainly Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Shultz - of the Republican versus Democrat voting system in the post-World War II era. Ignoring all the additional liberal CIA" and "conservative CIA" controlled opposition elements, also discussed in the Three Establishment Model and Boxes Model articles, and just sticking to "elite elements" of society, we find that America's Republican Party is split among liberal-globalist "Rockefeller Republicans" and a more nationalistic "Christian conservative" wing.

In turn, the latter is split into the influential pro-Israel "neoconservatives" and the increasingly marginal traditional right wing: the once-anti-Jewish, Christian conservative, anti-interventionist "old right" and the pro-interventionist "new right" of the Cold War, with the "Christian Right" spread among the both of them. The "old right" for the most part became known as the conspiracy-minded "alt right" in the run up to the 2016 Trump election, who represented all these elements in one, including the neoconservatives.

The neocons and Christian conservatives have been working together against liberals, mainly Democrats, since the 1970s. This peculiar alliance only breaks down within the lowest, controlled opposition John Birch Society, alt-right conspiracy network. At this level "neocons" can be attacked without issue.

One major problem with these right-wing establishments as a whole really is that they have been dominated by the CIA and the Pentagon ever since the creation of the national security state. ISGP's article on the American Security Council and its neoconservative follow-up, the Center for Security Policy, made this painfully clear, as well as ISGP's article on Le Cercle. More recently, in the Pilgrims Society article, ISGP looked into the financing of the neocon movement, which eventually came to include PNAC, through "conservative CIA" foundations as Olin, Bradley, Scaife, H. Smith Richardson Foundation and Achelis and Bodman. Not only do some of these foundations have clear CIA ties, but some of them also have had liberal establishment elites, including many Pilgrims, on the board for decades, sitting there alongside their conservative counterparts. It really makes one wonder to what extent the "neocons" or even traditional conservatives even exist as a separate establishment or if all of it is little more than just little factions within one larger establishment, controlled in its entirety by the security state. In fact, the author has already made the case that there is no such thing as a "conservative establishment".

That brings us to ISGP's definition of the "neocons": they are the "new conservatives" that emerged in the 1970s, as the pro-interventionist "new right" dropped switched its anti-Jewish character into a pro-Jewish one, as portrayed by the transition of the American Security Council to the Center for Security Policy. If anything, it might be best to refer to the Jewish aspect of the "new right" as "neoconservative", considering neoconservatism is so strongly tied to a group of Jewish scholars with an "Israel uber alles" mentality: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Pipes and quite a few others.

Most crucially, ISGP's model would predict that these neoconservatives should be just as much controlled opposition as the traditional "conservative establishment" of the "new right", "old right", and "Christian right". We've already seen evidence of that, with the Soros-, Kissinger- and -Brzezinski-tied General Wesley Clark, and much of the dominant liberal globalist media, attacking them so prominently, similar to how these newspapers always attacked the CIA-tied "new right conservatives" involved in the various scandals of the Reagan years: Iran-Contra, the wider Contra scandal, the Moonies and BCCI. Also with these "neocons:

1. we can't really find a separate power base in terms of multinational financing;
2. and they don't occupy the highest levels of government.

Are Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc. "neocons"? Or maybe right-wing globalists?

The term "neocon" is often liberally sprinkled out. We've given ISGP's definition of them in the previous section, but generally there's isn't a definitive answer as to what a "neoconservative" is. Some apply it to any Bush administration-tied official who supported the Iraq War or subsequent Democrat-led interventions in Syria and Gaddafi's Libya. At other times it specifically refers to hawkish Jewish scholars. If even George Shultz, who was cited in a previous section, couldn't give a definition of "neoconservatism", you know it's either a vague or sensitive subject. In this case it is both.

As a result of this vagueness, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney - respectively secretary of defense and vice president under George W. Bush - have been labeled "neoconservatives". The problem is - and as ISGP's index of institutes demonstrates - these men have been very comfortable with the liberal-globalist establishment, having held important positions in groups ranging from the CFR and the Bretton Woods Committee to the Eisenhower Fellowships and the Atlantic Institute of International Affairs. Yes, they ended up supporting Israel stronger than almost anyone in the liberal-globalist establishment, but does this make them part of an entirely new establishment? Hardly. Throughout the 1990s Rumsfeld even was a director of Gulfstream, together with George Shultz, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and Lynn Forester de Rothschild. His name also appeared in Pilgrims Society membership lists of the 1990s. So did the name of Bush's uncle, by the way, Prescott S. Bush, Jr., the brother of President George H. W. Bush. And upon seeing Cheney's puppy dog face when taking a question from David Rockefeller at the Council on Foreign Relations and hearing his introduction--quoted below--and it's immediately clear that Cheney too is extremely close to the liberal-globalist establishment:

"It's good to be back at the Council on Foreign Relations. As Pete [Peterson] mentioned, I've been a member for a long time and was actually a director for some period of time. I never mentioned that when I was campaigning for re-election back home in Wyoming." 100

Not only that, at the CFR, David Rockefeller thanked Cheney for his support for the Free Trade Agreement for all the Americas (FTAA):

"Vice president [Cheney], I just watched your whole speech, but I was particularly pleased that you gave such a strong endorsement for the Free Trade Agreement for all the Americas, a subject that has been of great concern to me for many years..." 101

The FTAA failed in 2008, but would have made it even easier for Latino immigrants to move into the United States. This not only shows that both "the left" and "the right" in American politics are globalist-oriented, but also that Cheney was fully in support of that agenda. In a joint appearance with Bill Clinton on July 13, 2017, George W. Bush showed to be of the exact same pro-Third World immigration mindset. Considering the FTAA's family-structure- and Christianity-destroying nature, that certainly excludes Bush and Cheney from the "Christian conservative" box they have been pretending to be part of.

If key Bush administration officials as Rumsfeld and Cheney aren't true neoconservatives, operating independently from the globalist establishment, then who are?

• National security advisor and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice? The George Shultz protege at Stanford University, the Chevron oil corporation, and Rockefeller bank JPMorgan Chase? 102


• Or secretary of state Colin Powell? Who in the 1990s was a director of Forstmann Little and Gulfstream, together with George Shultz, Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger and Lynn Forester de Rothschild?


• Or defense secretary and former CIA director Robert Gates? Who in the 1990s was to be found at the Forum For International Policy (FFIP), together with the afore-mentioned Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, key Kissinger proteges and Bush 41 administration men Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger?

These persons are the "new conservatives"? Hardly. They are not traditional "Christian conservatives" either. All of them feature high up in ISGP's Superclass Index, meaning they have had involvement in dozens of liberal-globalist think tanks. And this is just a small percentage of the globalist ties. In other words, they are just globalists - right-wing globalists if you will. But it should be clear that a Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell would be just as suitable for an Obama or Biden administration. Gates actually stayed on as secretary of defense for 2.5 years in the Obama administration. It makes little difference. The "radicals" played their part in initiating the War on Terror, and now the "moderates" can come in to continue it with a little less torture and overt invasion.

Real (Jewish) neocons: mid level State and Defense influencers: a list of names

So, at the top of the Bush administration, no true neocons existed, at least not of the Jewish kind. So where did they exist? Well, looking at the Jewish character, the fact is that virtually all well known "neocons" fall into one or more of the categories below:

1. Mid-level Pentagon employees.
2. Actually also State Department employees looking at David J. Kramer.
3. National security scholars.
4. Executives of CIA-, State- and Pentagon-linked think tanks.

Well known neoconservatives include:

1. Richard Perle
2. Paul Wolfowitz
3. Douglas Feith
4. Michael Ledeen
5. Dov Zakheim
6. Frank Gaffney
7. Irving Kristol
8. William Kristol
9. Joshua Muravchik
10. Norman Podhoretz
11. Midge Decter
12. Richard Pipes
13. Daniel Pipes
14. Elliott Abrams
15. Ariel Cohen
16. Edward Luttwak
17. David Kramer
18. David & Meyrav Wurmser

The fact is, while being influential in a whole range of NGOs, these "neocons" never rose to top positions in the U.S. government. Paul Wolfowitz held the highest office: as Rumsfeld's deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005. Douglas Feith, as under secretary of defense for policy, served under Wolfowitz, and, together with Michael Ledeen and AIPAC henchmen as Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, collected much of the dirty propaganda to make a U.S. invasion of Iraq possible. 103 By 2004 they also were investigated by the FBI for secretly providing classified Pentagon information to Israel. 104 Who could have predicted that?

Already back in the early 1980s, Feith served under Richard Perle in the Defense Department. A full decade later, in 2001, Bush 43 appointed Perle chairman of the Defense Policy Board. This is not an official government position though and already in 2003 he was forced to step down. Back when Reagan came into office in 1981, Perle did have an official position at the Defense Department, but counted Fred Ikle and General Richard Stilwell, a former CIA chief in the Far East, among his superiors here. Throughout the 1980s these men were key liaisons to the secretive Cercle group, most likely arranged through the connections of their boss, deputy secretary of defense Frank Carlucci. Carlucci was a friend of controversial CIA spook Ted Shackley, who played a key role in running the Cercle group. Carlucci is actually said to have made a decision with Shackley, General Vernon Walters (ASC), George H. W. Bush and others, to try and foment a silent CIA coup of the White House in the late 1970s, which took the form of the hawkish Reagan administration 105 As we know that Carlucci, Shackley and Bush were close associates and friends from the 1970s on and into the 21st century, 106 it's not surprising either that Rumsfeld, a college friend and political protege of Carlucci; and George W. Bush, the son of George H. W. Bush, allowed the neocons to return. However, the neocons do not control anything. They are always brought in as assistants.

As has been discussed in some detail in ISGP's American Security Council article, many neocons originated from the office of Senator Henry Jackson to be employed as "detente wreckers", the famous policy embraced by secretary of state and national security advisor Henry Kissinger, with support from the Rockefellers and much of the CFR elite. Back in the 1970s the following upcoming neocons all were employed at Senator Jackson's office, which by itself is a curious situation:

1. Richard Perle 107, a Jackson staffer from 1969 to 1980;
2. Frank Gaffney 108 ;
3. Paul Wolfowitz 109, who soon ended up on the "Team B" CIA advisory panel through its chair, Richard Pipes, because "Perle recommended him so highly" 110 ;
4. Richard Pipes, who had been brought in as a part-time "consultant" by Jackson at the recommendation of Perle 111 ;
5. Edward Luttwak 112, earlier Perle's roommate at the London School of Economics 113 ;
6. Douglas Feith 114 ;
7. and Elliott Abrams 115 .

Senator Henry Jackson was listed among the "The Founders, Benefactors and Strategists" of the American Security Council and known as a hawkish, anti-communist Democrat senator from 1953 until his death in 1983. In 1976 he and the CIA-tied neocon Michael Ledeen were founders of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), where CIA director James Woolsey, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz (a co-chair) and Douglas Feith (vice chair) all ended up on the board. In fact, Ledeen, Woolsey and Perle jointly left the board of JINSA in 2012. In 1979 Senator Henry Jackson was part of the Jonathan Institute in Jerusalem, again surrounded by Jewish neoconservatives, as well as a recently retired CIA director George H. W. Bush. Then, 22 years after this death, in 2005, prominent neoconservatives as James Woolsey and Richard Perle set up the neocon Henry Jackson Society.

Looking at this background, Senator Henry Jackson must have played a key role in founding the "neocon establishment", right? Well, before jumping to that conclusion, let's search ISGP's index of NGOs for any other former ties of Senator Jackson. Again, it doesn't take long to find that Senator Jackson also was involved in plenty of major liberal-globalist projects of the Rockefeller-kind:

1. In 1971, together with Nelson Rockefeller, a co-founder of the America-Israel Friendship League (AIFL). Certainly in the post-9/11 era, this would end up being a peculiar group. On the one hand, directors of the AIFL in that period included long-time respective ADL and CPMAJO chiefs Abraham Foxman and Malcolm Hoenlein, as well as other Jewish globalist and Israel Lobby heavyweights, including multiple billionaires: Kenneth Bialkin, Mortimer Zuckerman, Ronald Lauder, Michael Steinhardt and Michael Ovitz. On the other hand, "Rockefeller liberal" and "Rockefeller conservative" globalist elites as Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, former Kissinger Associates president Lawrence Eagleburger, former Rockefeller Foundation trustee Vernon Jordan, who brought Bill Clinton into the CFR, Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission before even announcing his presidential campaign; all were on the advisory board of this group. With that, the AIFL grew to become a key liaison NGO for Eastern Establishment ties with the Zionists, which has seldom been overly friendly.


2. Along with countless elite senators, a founding advisory board member in 1977 of the Alliance to Save Energy under advisory board chairman Henry Kissinger. Founding directors of the group included Laurance Rockefeller, David Rockefeller and two dozen of their elite CFR-tied friends.


3. Alongside Nelson Rockefeller, Rockefeller mentor John McCloy and countless other elites, anno 1977 a honorary director of the Atlantic Council. Kissinger had just become a director and continued to be one into the 2020s.

Kissinger actually has stated that he "considered Jackson a good friend, and I agreed with many of his analyses of Soviet intentions." The only difference was that Jackson was looking for "all-out confrontation [with the Soviet Union], under the influence of ... Richard Perle." 116 Zbigniew Brzezinski, when serving as Jimmy Carter national security advisor, considered Perle for a position at his National Security Council, but in the end Perle was never appointed. 117 In the end you have to reach the conclusion that the emerging neocons were an accepted part within Washington's elite. Paul Nitze, the right-wing globalist hawk who was Bilderberg's early advisor on the Soviet Union, came to deal a lot with the neocons, such as in 1975-1976 as part of Team B, together with Richard Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz. "Neocon godfather" Fritz Kraemer recruited Henry Kissinger in 1944, a decade before Nelson Rockefeller did so, and also recruited the hawkish Alexander Haig in 1961. Both Haig and Kraemer's son, Sven, came to work for Kissinger. Subsequently, Sven became an assistant to detente wrecker Senator John Tower, and Haig was accepted as the first secretary of state in the anti-detente Reagan administration.

The peculiar situation at the office of Senator Henry Jackson, together with all of Senator Jackson's globalist ties, does stand at the center of this neocon mystery. This situation occurred in the same period that a number of CIA-linked "neocon" foundations began building the "neocon" movement - except that, once again, at least half of these foundations also contained liberal Eastern Establishment elites on their board. The foundations in question were the:

1. Olin Foundation
2. H. Smith Richardson Foundation
3. Scaife foundations
4. Bradley Foundation
5. Coors Foundation
6. Achelis and Bodman Foundation

To illustrate, what was John J. McCloy, a Pilgrim, CFR chair, Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation chair and the mentor of David Rockefeller at both the CFR and Chase Manhattan Bank, doing on the board of the Olin Foundation from the late 1970s until his death in 1989? That's just where the Eastern Establishment ties of the birth of the neocon movement start. John M. Olin was a long-time member of the Pilgrims from the 1960s on. Key "conservative CIA" financier Richard Mellon Scaife, a cousin of Pilgrims as Andrew and Paul Mellon, was on the advisory board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a group dominated by Kissinger and Brzezinski in particular. In 1985 not just Scaife and a bunch of right-wingers were founding governors of the Reagan Foundation, so were the Pilgrims David Rockefeller, Brooke Astor and various other "liberal" globalist elites, similar to how the "conservative" Reagan administration was dominated by these elites. As has been done in the Pilgrims Society article with these early "neocon" foundations, we could go on.

Going back to Senator Henry Jackson's clique, Richard Pipes used to be on the board of the CIA- and Pentagon-dominated American Security Council and chaired "Team B". Gaffney founded the Center for Security Policy, the unofficial neocon successor of the American Security Council. Another, Luttwak, worked at the prestigious CSIS think tank for several decades. In this capacity he has been a permanent consultant to various special operations branches of the Pentagon, the national security council, the State Department, and, unofficially, the CIA covert operations clique surrounding Ted Shackley. Still, Gaffney, Pipes, Luttwak, and fellow-neocons ranging from Joshua Muravchik to Michael Ledeen, never held any official government positions. They somehow made a name for themselves as outside "consultants", often to the highest government officials.

Of course, besides Perle, Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, a few other neocons certainly did hold official positions in the U.S. government:

1. William Kristol, the famous founder and chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) 118, was chief of staff to vice president Dan Quayle in the administration of George H. W. Bush.
2. Dov Zakheim was another mid-level Pentagon employee under Reagan who was reappointed during the administration of George W. Bush, in his case as under secretary of defense (comptroller).
3. David J. Kramer, who held various upper level State Deparment positions during the George W. Bush administration.

That's about it. All this stands in stark contrast to the 30 important NGOs and Pentagon advisory groups Zakheim has been involved in, quite often alongside former CIA director James Woolsey. Kristol held almost 40 of such positions. His father, Irving Kristol, infamously co-founded Encounter magazine with CIA backing 119 and adds over a dozen more of such positions.

A latter day find of this author is (Jewish) David J. Kramer, who at the moment of this writing has been tied to 10 NGOs. Once again it quickly becomes clear this person does not represent any kind of separate "neocon establishment". Kramer has an early history at CSIS, the Carnegie Endowment and then as a senior fellow at PNAC - very familiar places that completely and totally transcend the "liberal-globalist" and "neocon" division. He joined the CFR in 1998. From 2000 to 2009 he held various senior positions in the State Deparment. Among his positions was as special advisor to under secretary of state for global affairs Paula Dobriansky, a major hawkish superclass member. From 2005 to 2008 he was deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. During the final year of the Bush administration in 2008-2009, he was employed as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor.

After his government service, Kramer disappeared back into the think tank world, first at the once-Rockefeller-funded German Marshall Fund, and then, from 2010, as executive director of the global "parallel CIA" group Freedom House. Through these NGOs, as well as the international advisory council of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), which also included top superclass members Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeleine Albright and Carl Bildt, he was able to continue to exercise political influence in eastern Europe.

Apart from being handed the position of executive director of the George W. Bush Institute, in 2016 Kramer was also appointed executive director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership. Through this position, Kramer was handed the Steele Dossier about Donald Trump. Officially meant to only be seen by Senator McCain, Kramer, supposedly at his own initiative, leaked the report to "liberal CIA" media outlet Buzzfeed 120, causing months of controversy about the only anti-immigration candidate (in theory) with nothing of substance.

What do we see here all the time? Low level Jewish neocons being accepted by much more influential conservative and even liberal globalist elites.

Neocons as CIA-Mossad liaisons

If anything, the vast majority of neocons, if not all of them, appear to be assets of the CIA and-or Mossad and certainly to be used as liaisons to the Israeli government. As has been discussed by ISGP, the CIA, mainly through the private club of men as Richard Helms, Ted Shackley, Frank Carlucci and George H. W. Bush, has maintained relations with the Vatican-Paneuropa network (see Le Cercle Pinay), the Saudis (Safari Club), and, seemingly through the neocons, Israel. Just one of the latter-day examples this author ran across is Edward Luttwak, an expert on death squads and coups, who can be tied to Giancarlo Elia Valori through Italintesa and an Aspen Institute-sponsored meeting in Italy. 121 Valori used to be a Cercle member 122 and one of the key players in the P2 Lodge, part of the fascist-terrorist "Strategy of Tension" campaign in Italy. To this day he has top-level friends in the United States and the Israel lobby, and is still suspected to be a major behind-the-scenes power player.

Almost certainly Valori was well-acquainted with Michael Ledeen, another fascist Zionist extremist ("neocon"), at the time of Italy's false flag bombings, the Banco Ambrosiano scandal and the subsequent P2 affair. Ledeen was operating in Italy as a SISMI military intelligence "risk consultant". He primarily worked with controversial SISMI asset Francesco Pazienza, with P2 member General Giuseppe Santovito being the head of SISMI at the time. Both Pazienza and Santovito were close associates of Valori, who in more recent decades turned from a Vatican insider to being one of the closest friends of radical Zionism. 123

Of course, Ledeen also never held any official government position. He's just an academic and journalist who shows up wherever some kind of conspiracy is suspected, whether it's an assassination attempt on the pope, Iran Contra, or the forging of the Yellowcake controversy, apparently with former P2 member, Italy's prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration. Unsurprisingly, Ledeen has been close to CIA covert operation veterans as William Colby and especially Ted Shackley for many decades.

Senator Jackson himself, apart from his globalist ties, was closely linked to this same CIA group. In 1973 he worked closely with top CIA officers Ted Shackley, William Colby and James Schlesinger in undermining the Church Committee's inquiries into Richard Helms' illegal CIA projects: MK-ULTRA, the Kennedy assassination, coups, Mockingbird, etc. 124 Jackson is also known to have been a darling of the American Security Council and to have visited the secretive Cercle group of Shackley, although it was mainly the ever-present Richard Perle or an assistant of his, Pat Balestreri, who showed up as a Pentagon liaison to Le Cercle in the 1980s. Wolfowitz visited Le Cercle in the early 1990s.

How exactly did this network come about? We don't really know the details, but Perle, as well as Wolfowitz, was sent to Jackson's office by Albert Wohlstetter 125, one of the godfathers of neoconservatism who was a veteran of the RAND Corporation and various right-wing and national security think tanks and government advisory boards, all linked to the Pentagon and the CIA. These include the Hudson Institute, "Team B", the IISS, the European American Institute for Security Research, the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, the Executive Panel of the Chief of Naval Operations, the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, the Defense Science Board, and more.

Zalmay Khalilzad and later CIA-recruit-to-topple-Saddam Hussein Ahmed Chalabi 126, as already discussed, also were initially picked up by Albert Wohlstetter. 127 As also already discussed, PNAC was financed by "conservative CIA" foundations, with the main PNAC founder, William Kristol, having a father whose 1950s-1960s publication was covertly financed by the CIA. 128

When you check all the NGOs the "neocons" have been part of you find countless top-level national security ties to the U.S. and Israel in particular. This would have to lead to the conclusion that these "neocons" are some kind of combination of CIA, Mossad, Israeli and U.s. government representatives, and "establishment" - yet not the actual top.

James Woolsey's road to CIA director - until he really became influential post-9/11 as the "neocon godfather"

Interestingly, Richard Perle is actually not the most connected neocon of all. Ranked far above him on the neoconservative ladder is the ultraconnected CIA spook James Woolsey, the number 2 or 3 in ISGP's Superclass Index, right behind Henry Kissinger. Indeed, Woolsey has been involved in more think tanks and advisory bodies than a Zbigniew Brzezinski, and roughly sits on par with David Rockefeller - if we ignore the family's influence as a whole - and George Shultz. He also did so in a remarkably short time, as since 9/11, Woolsey has played a role in almost every think tank and action group set up by the neocons, often alongside Richard Perle and Dov Zakheim.

At the same time though, Woolsey has always been intricately connected to the core of the liberal-globalist establishment, best illustrated by his early support for anti-global warming measures, Yale and Rhodes Scholarship background (senators of his 1993 CIA senate confirmation hearing were joking about Rhodes scholars apparently being an "Old Boy Network" and "Mafia that has suddenly taken over the Administration" 129), membership in the CFR since 1975, directorship of the Atlantic Council since 1981, positions at the Smithsonian, and vice chairmanship of the CSIS think tank by 1988 130, where for more than a decade he shared boards with Henry Kissinger, Maurice Greenberg, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Claiborne Pell (closest of friends with the Liechtenstein royal family), top European Union globalist and honorary Bilderberg chair Etienne Davignon and Baron Edmond de Rothschild. 131 The neocon Edward Luttwak was equally active at CSIS.

At the same time Woolsey was the ultimate arms industry insider--quite possibly as a CIA informant--as a lawyer and director of corporations as British Aerospace, DynCorp, Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas, Litton Industries, Fairchild Industries, Rockwell, SAIC, the Titan Corporation, United Technologies, General Dynamics and also the Carlyle Group. 132 In 1987 and 1988 Woolsey was a member of the Scientific Advisory Group of the Joint Strategic Targetting and Planning Staff at Offutt Air Force Base. Worryingly, this is where part of the Franklin child abuse affair supposedly took place, with Woolsey and his wife, a national security behavioral psychologist, being rather closely linked to the affair. 133

Woolsey's first association with the neoconservatives, as far as ISGP can figure things out, appears to have been at the Executive Panel of the Chief of Naval Operations when he joined it in 1980. Archneocon Albert Wohlstetter, a RAND scientist and Pentagon consultant who had sent Perle and Wolfowitz to Senator Jackson's office, served on the Executive Panel from 1971 until his death in 1997. Woolsey actually beat him in terms of longest-serving member, still being a member today.

In 1988 Woolsey's neocon ties were solidified when he joined the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) 134, co-founded a decade earlier by Senator Henry Jackson (there he is again) and Iran-Contra veteran Michael Ledeen 135, who, just as Jackson, was close to CIA officers Ted Shackley, of Le Cercle, and Ray Cline, a co-chair of the American Security Council and the U.S. Global Strategy Council. There's every indication that back in the 1970s and early 1980s Ledeen was a key U.S. liaison to the fascist P2 Lodge for Shackley at the CIA and Alexander Haig (Pilgrims and Kissinger protege) at the State Department. 136 Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz (co-chair), Douglas Feith (vice-chair), and even Morris Amitay, AIPAC's executive director, could all be found at JINSA no later than the early 1990s. 137 Ledeen, Perle, and Woolsey stayed on the board of JINSA until early 2012 when a dispute arose with a more moderate lead financier of JINSA and all three prominently resigned. 138 Clearly the three men had grown very close over the decades.

Woolsey, Ledeen and also Perle, through his association with Le Cercle, clearly all can be considered CIA assets. We could argue that Woolsey likely already was CIA when he established Yale Citizens for Eugene McCarthy for President in 1967, a curious anti-Vietnam War candidate apparently in the business of educating hippies to cut their hair and dress properly. In other words, Woolsey's 1993 appointment as CIA director doesn't appear to have been a coincidence and as a lifelong CIA officer, it's also questionable that Woolsey's appointment to the board of JINSA and dozens of later neocon outfits has been a coincidence.

Personally, this author suspects Woolsey was picked by the private CIA network set up by Richard Helms and Ted Shackley, and in later decades still counted George H. W. Bush and Frank Carlucci among its ranking members, as the network's chief liaison to the Israel lobby. If anybody is managing the neoconservative movement from behind the scenes, at least from the U.S. side, it would be Woolsey. Woolsey has definitely been close to this CIA group, as his co-chairmanship of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers and the OSS Society, both with George H. W. Bush, demonstrates. Other former CIA officers as James Schlesinger, Frank Carlucci, Richard Helms have also been involved with these groups. Ted Shackley was a key player in the AFIO until his death in 2002. Clearly all these men knew each other very well, but Woolsey's old CIA ties remain obscure. His Pentagon, neocon and liberal establishment ties are very clear, however.

Woolsey and Cheney may well all have been assigned to manage the "neocon radicals", as Cheney was a board member of JINSA from 1993 to 1999. Cheney and Woolsey, who reportedly are close, also know each other from the board of the Jamestown Foundation - where Donald Rumsfeld was to be found as well - and the Center for Security Policy. Both men appear to be deep insiders to the United States' most illegal black programs, as the men's association with the Russian firm Far West alone seems to indicate. 139 When it comes to any major black program the Pentagon might be running, it's hard to imagine Woolsey not being aware of it to some degree - as a lot of Unacknowledged Special Access Programs (USAPs) seem to be hidden in private industry. On top of that, Woolsey has served on numerous low profile Pentagon committees. Who the heck has ever heard of the Outer Continental Shelf Policy Committee (OCSPC), the Deterrence Concepts Advisory Group (DCAG), the Disruptive Technology Committee, the Future of Navy Force Structure (FNFS), or the Navy Personnel Policy (NPP)? Not a lot of people, but Woolsey served on all of them.

^Conclusions and summary

So yes, the estimate of this author is that the Bush clique represented the old boys of the CIA, its most "insider" aspect surrounding names as Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Ted Shackley, while the neocons have been operating as CIA-Mossad liasions. Or liaisons between the right-wing aspect of the Israeli-U.S. superclass. This entails that these people do a lot of the dirty work, quite directly, as discussed in ISGP's article on the history of CIA-Mossad coups. In contrast, some other heads of state might be a bit further removed from this deepest element of the intelligence community.

All that having been said, there is no evidence that the neocons represent an independent establishment of their own. They are liaisons between America's Christian conservative establishment and right-wing Zionist establishment, centered in Israel, New York City and Washington, D.C. These establishments have been discussed in a separate article by ISGP.

^Notes

---

1. *) April 14, 2003, The Guardian (Ford and Rockefeller Fdn.-financed), 'The rise of the Washington 'neo-cons''. Cites articles from all the newspapers mentioned except the N.Y. Times and L.A. Times.
   *) Dec. 17, 2006, New York Times, 'Letter From New York: Should neocons take the fall for Iraq? - Americas - International Herald Tribune'; March 15 2008, New York Times, 'Getting Out of the Mess the Neocons Made'. Etc.
   *) June 10, 2004, Los Angeles Times, 'A Tough Time for 'Neocons'; April 2, 2015, Los Angeles Times, 'Op-Ed: The neocons: They're back, and on Iran, they're uncompromising as ever'. Etc.
2. 2017, Peter Dale Scott, 'The American Deep State - Updated Version', pp. 82-84, as an example.
3. April 5, 2023, Alex Jones' Infowars.com, 'RFK Jr: 'The Neocon Projects' in Iraq and Ukraine...' (hour-long interview).
4. Feb. 26, 2023, Infowars, 'Neocon Condoleezza Rice Says Biden 'A Little Bit Behind' on His Ukraine Policy But Going 'In Right Direction''.
5. June 10, 2004, Los Angeles Times, 'A Tough Time for 'Neocons''.
6. Financing:
   • mediatransparency.org/ grantsearchresults.php?searchString=New+American+Century (accessed: October 1, 2006): "1-1-1997: $50,000. [Purpose:] Project for the New American Century. [Recipient:] New Citizenship Project, Inc. Sarah Scaife Foundation."
   • mediatransparency.org/ grantsearchresults.php?searchString=New+American+Century (accessed: October 1, 2006): "8-11-1997 [and] 12-10-1997: $25,000. [Purpose:] To support the Project for the New American Century. [Recipient:] New Citizenship Project, Inc. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Inc. ... 9-22-1998: $100,000. ... 11-11-1998: $50,000. ... 1-1-1999: $150,000. ... 12-20-2000: $150,000. ... 9-17-2003: $50,000. ... 10-20-2003: $50,000. ... 11-10-2003: $50,000. ... 12-10-2003: $50,000. ... 9-10-2004: $43,750."
   • 2003 annual report, Bradley Foundation, p. 22: "New Citizen Project, Washington, DC. To support the Project for the New American Century: $200,000."
   • mediatransparency.org/ grantsearchresults.php?searchString=New+American+Century (accessed: October 1, 2006): "1-1-1999: $50,000. Project for the New American Century. New Citizenship Project, Inc. John M. Olin Foundation, Inc. ... 1-1-2001: $10,000. ... 1-15-2003: 10,000."
   • mediatransparency.org/ recipientgrants.php?recipientID=2243 (accessed: February 7, 2008): "To see all grants to the PNAC, you must see the grants directly to PNAC, as well as those designated to PNAC through other organizations, such as the New Citizenship Project. ...
     - Olin Foundation... 1-1-2002: $15,000 [and] 1-15-2003: $10,000 [and] 2-6-2004: $15,000 [and] 12-7-2004: $6,000...
     - Earhart Foundation: ... 1-1-2000: $17,420 [and] 1-1-2002: $8,315. ...
     - William H. Donner Foundation: ... 1-1-2002: $20,000. ...
     - Hickory Foundation: ... 1-1-2003: $50,000 [and] 12-31-2005: $50,000. ...
     - Gilder Foundation: ... 12-31-2003: $50,000."
7. newamericancentury.org/ statementofprinciples.htm (accessed: Feb. 5, 2002)
8. Ibid.
9. newamericancentury.org/ iraqclintonletter.htm (accessed: Oct. 17, 2001; letter date: Jan. 26, 1998).
10. newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm (accessed: Dec. 1, 2002; letter date: May 29, 1998).
11. Sep. 2000, PNAC report, 'Rebuilding America's Defenses', p. 51.
12. 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, 'The Grand Chessboard', p. 35.
13. Sep. 2000, PNAC report, 'Rebuilding America's Defenses', pp. 50-51.
14. Ibid., pp. 50-68: Part V.
15. June 1, 1992, minneapolisfed.org, 'Interview with Milton Friedman': "Building codes impose costs that you might not privately want to engage in, wage and hour laws—and on and on." George Shultz was one of Milton Friedman's closest friends.
16. May 20, 2007, The American Prospect, 'The Apprentice': "Paul Wolfowitz, who first met Wohlstetter at a faculty tea hour at the University of Chicago in 1964, by which time Wohlstetter had written his most-important works and had gathered together a group of young followers. Among them was Richard Perle, who had fallen under his spell five years earlier. (Wohlstetter's daughter invited Perle, then in high school, to swim in the family pool; there, Perle met Wohlstetter, who handed him "The Delicate Balance of Terror." ... In [the book], Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, and others appear as hapless characters intellectually marooned in a pre-nuclear age."
17. Ibid.
18. Sep. 8, 2006, Senate Committee on Intelligence, 'The Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress', pp. 5-6: "In the Spring of 1991, President George H. W. Bush approaved efforts aimed at influencing those in the Iraqi government and military to undertake action to change the Iraqi leadership. ... In May 1991, the CIA approached Dr. Ahmed Chalabi... Chalabi and the CIA began to work together. In June of 1992, more than 200 Iraqi opposition leaders met in Vienna. This conference saw the creation of the INC...""
19. Dec. 2011, Mother Jones, 'Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq': "11/6/00 Congress doubles funding for Iraqi opposition groups to more than $25 million; $18 million is earmarked for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, which then pays defectors for anti-Iraq tales.".
20. Feb. 21, 2013, William Rivers Pitt for Truthout, 'The United States of Aftermath': "PNAC was the driving force behind the drafting and passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act in 1998, a bill that essentially turned their desire for war into American law. PNAC funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to a group called the Iraqi National Congress, and to the man they intended to be Iraq’s heir-apparent, Ahmed Chalabi... Chalabi and the INC gathered support for their cause by promising oil contracts to anyone who would help overthrow Saddam Hussein and put them into power in Iraq.".
21. Nov. 3, 2015, ABC News, 'How Ahmed Chalabi's Faulty Intel Altered US Course in Iraq'.
22. May 4, 2004, Salon, 'How Ahmed Chalabi conned the neocons'.
23. Jan. 16, 2003, Thaddeus Herrick for the Wall Street Journal, 'U.S. Oil Wants to Work in Iraq; Firms Discuss How to Raise Nation’s Output After a Possible War': "Executives of U.S. oil companies are conferring with officials from the White House, the Department of Defense and the State Department to figure out how best to jump-start Iraq's oil industry following a war, industry officials say.
    The Bush administration is eager to secure Iraq's oil fields and rehabilitate them, industry officials say. They say Mr. Cheney's staff hosted an informational meeting with industry executives in October [2002], with Exxon Mobil Corp., ChevronTexaco Corp., ConocoPhillips and Halliburton among the companies represented.
    Both the Bush administration and the companies say such a meeting never took place. Since then, industry officials say, the Bush administration has sought input, formally and informally, from executives and industry experts on how best to overhaul Iraq's oil sector.”"
24. Nov. 3, 2002, The Observer / The Guardian, 'Carve-up of oil riches begins'.
25. Ibid.
26. May 4, 2004, Salon, 'How Ahmed Chalabi conned the neocons'.
27. *) Oct. 6, 2002, Sunday Herald, 'Official: US oil at the heart of Iraq crisis': "The report, Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century, concludes...".
    sundayherald.com/print28285 (accessed: Oct. 31, 2002). It is quite shocking how low-profile the information in this article is.
    *) Description of the report in question (it doesn't mention "Iraq", "Hussein", or some of the key participants):
    July 2001, no. 16, Baker Institute Report, Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, 'Task Force Issues Recommendations for Energy Policy': "The Baker Institute/Council on Foreign Relations task force report was promulgated on the eve of the final deliberations of the administration’s energy task force headed by Vice President Cheney. ... The task force released the report to the media at a news conference April 12 in Washington, D.C. ... Amy Jaffe and Edward Morse headed the independent task force that issued a report titled “Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century.”"
    rice.edu/projects/baker/Pubs /reports/Pubs/bipp200107/ bipp200107_03.html (accessed: Oct. 31, 2002).
28. May 4, 2003, The New Yorker, 'Selective Intelligence'; July 17, 2003, The Guardian, 'The spies who pushed for war'.
29. July 8, 1996, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser for the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm'.
30. newamericancentury.org/ balkans_pdf_04.pdf (accessed: June 15, 2003; Date signed: Sep. 20, 1998).
31. March 2, 2007, Democracy Now!, 'Gen. Wesley Clark Weighs Presidential Bid' (hour-long interview).
32. Oct. 3, 2007, Wesley Clark speech to the Commonwealth Club, YouTube upload by 'FORA.tv', 'Wes Clark - America's Foreign Policy "Coup"'.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Nov. 30, 2003, CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, 'Interview With Wesley Clark...'.
37. stopiranwar.com/?page_id=9 (accessed: Feb. 28, 2007): "About Us. About Wes Clark."
38. stopiranwar.com/?page_id=3 (accessed: Feb. 28, 2007; Feb. 26, 2007 post).
39. March 2, 2007, Democracy Now!, 'Gen. Wesley Clark Weighs Presidential Bid' (hour-long interview).
40. Sep. 30, 2003, Wayne Madson or Counterpunch, 'Wesley Clark for President? Another Neocon Con Job'.
41. Oct. 3, 2007, Wesley Clark speech to the Commonwealth Club, YouTube upload by 'FORA.tv', 'Wes Clark - America's Foreign Policy "Coup"'.
42. Oct. 3, 2007, Wesley Clark speech to the Commonwealth Club, YouTube upload by 'FORA.tv', 'Wes Clark - America's Foreign Policy "Coup"': "I went to see Don Rumsfeld [after 9/11]. I worked for him as a White House fellow in the 1970s."
43. Jan. 19, 1975, New York Times, 'The Secret Committee Called ‘40’'; July 16, 1978, New York Times, 'Kissinger‐Colby Briefings on C.I.A. Called Misleading by Senate Panel': "... the 40 Committee, a high‐level group chaired by Mr. Kissinger that approved all covert intelligence activities..."
44. 1989, CSIS, trustees and advisory board (PDF): "CSIS Board of Trustees: ... Vice Chairmen: Maurice R, Greenberg... Members: ... Zbigniew Brzeinski ... Henry A. Kissinger ... Paul A. Volcker... Advisory Board, August 2, 1989: Chairman: *Paul A. Volcker... Cochairman: * Sam Nunn... Vice Chairmen: ... *R. James Woolsey... Members: ... Viscount Etienne Davignon... Baron Edmond de Rothschild... Mortimer B. Zuckerman... *steering committee."
    *) csis.org/html/csislead.html (accessed: Oct. 18, 2000; first webarchive with Gen. Wesley Clark): "Board of Trustees: Chairman: Sam Nunn ... Zbigniew Brzezinski ... Henry A. Kissinger ... [Kissinger protege] Brent Scowcroft ... R. James Woolsey... The Advisory Board [is] cochaired by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carla Hills... Counselors: ... Zbigniew Brzezinski [and] Henry Kissinger. Sam Nunn. ... Distinguished Senior Advisers: Wesley Clark..."
45. crisisweb.org/about/board.cfm (accessed: Feb. 5, 2001; July 2000 board, the first one with Clark; Zuckerman added to the July 2000 board in retrospect, so may have joined last-minute for that month): "George Soros ... Wesley Clark ... Jacques Delors ... HRH El-Hassan bin Talal ... Shimon Peres ... Thorvald Stoltenberg ... Grigory Yavlinsky... Martti Ahtisaari, Chairman. ... Stephen Solarz, Vice-Chair, ICG. ... Morton Abramowitz... Mortimer Zuckerman..."
46. crisisgroup.org/who-we-are/board (accessed: Jan. 15, 2018; Clark would disappear later this year): "Co-chair: Lord (Mark) Malloch-Brown* ... George Soros ... Alexander Soros ... Carl Bildt ... Wesley Clark ... Wolfgang Ischinger ... Wim Kok ... Andrey Kortunov ... Javier Solana ... Lawrence H. Summers..."
47. crisisweb.org/about/board.cfm (accessed: Oct. 16, 2002; July 2002 board, the first one with Zbigniew Brzezinski): "George Soros ... Wesley Clark ... Carla Hills ... Zbigniew Brzezinski [July 2002-2010, advisor anno 2013] ... Mikhail Khodorkovsky [disappeared after his arrest by Putin in Russia in 2003] ... [Etc.]"
48. ncafp.org/principals/index.htm (accessed: Aug. 13, 2001; the site was reorganized from late March 2001 to July 2001; Clark did not appear earlier.): "Officers: Honorable George F. Kennan, Honorary Chairman. ... Trustees: ... *Kenneth J. Bialkin, Esq. General Wesley K. Clark... Anthony Drexel Duke... *Honorable Maxwell Rabb... Board of advisors: ... Honorable Jeane J. Kirkpatrick ... Professor Richard Pipes ... Nancy Soderberg..."
49. May 18, 2009, Zocalo Public Square, 'Richard N. Haass, "When Should the U.S. Go to War?"'.
50. May/June 2009, Zbigniew Brzezinski for the CFR's Foreign Affairs, 'A Tale of Two Wars'.
51. May 18, 2009, Zocalo Public Square, 'Richard N. Haass, "When Should the U.S. Go to War?"'.
52. Ibid.
53. Aug. 19, 2002, abc.net.au, 'Caution urged on Iraq'.
54. Ibid.
55. May 4, 2003, New York Times, 'Selective Intelligence'; June 17, 2003, The Guardian, 'The spies who pushed for war'.
56. Aug. 19, 2002, abc.net.au, 'Caution urged on Iraq': "LEIGH SALES: It's well known in Washington that two of the strongest advocates of military action against Saddam Hussein are Richard Perle, Chairman of the Defence Policy Board, and Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defence. Lawrence Eagleburger is accusing the two of virtually misleading the President.
    LAWRENCE EAGLEBURGER: I think they're devious. [They] have been for years, committed to getting rid of Saddam Hussein because they think we should have done it the first time around. And secondly, I think they have convinced themselves that it can be done on the cheap by using these rebels... I am scared to death that they are going to convince the President ... and we'll find ourselves in the middle of a swamp because we didn't plan to do it in the right way. ... We don't have the allies on our side. ...
    LEIGH SALES: Mr Eagleburger's cautious position is backed by ... Henry Kissinger, and Brent Scowcroft..."
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Sep. 12, 2001, ABC News, Lawrence Eagleburger interviewed by Peter Jennings.
60. May/June 2009, Zbigniew Brzezinski for the CFR's Foreign Affairs, 'A Tale of Two Wars'.
61. Feb.-Mar. 2004, Library of Congress Information Bulletin, The Case for War in Iraq: George Shultz Speaks at the Library. loc.gov/loc/lcib/0402-3/shultz.html (accessed: Sep. 6, 2023).
    July 30, 2006, Hoover.org, 'George Shultz, Father of the Bush Doctrine'.
62. Sep. 12, 2001, ABC News, James Woolsey interviewed by Peter Jennings.
63. Jan. 8, 2002, Alexander Haig interview, Newsmax, 'Haig: Target Syria Next, Not Iraq'; June 3, 2004, Joint Military Intelligence College conference, speech of Alexander Haig'.
64. senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes /vote1072/vote_107_2_00237.htm (accessed: Oct. 2, 2023; gives the "yea" or "nay" votes per senator for the "Joint Resolution (H.J.Res. 114 )", i.e. 'Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002'.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Oct. 10, 2002, C-Span live broadcast from the Senate floor, Hillary Clinton speech. c-span.org/video/?173141-1/senate-session, 9:59:00 (accessed: Oct. 2, 2023).
72. senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes /vote1072/vote_107_2_00237.htm (accessed: Oct. 2, 2023).
73. Oct. 10, 2002, C-Span live broadcast from the Senate floor, Sen. Joe Biden speech. c-span.org/video/?173141-1/senate-session, 10:40:00 (accessed: Oct. 2, 2023).
74. senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes /vote1072/vote_107_2_00237.htm (accessed: Oct. 2, 2023).
75. Oct. 9, 2002, C-Span, live broadcast, John Kerry on the Senate floor. c-span.org/video/?173118-1/senate-session, 6:24:00 (accessed: Oct. 2, 2023).
76. senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes /vote1072/vote_107_2_00237.htm (accessed: Oct. 2, 2023).
77. Oct. 10, 2002, C-Span live broadcast from the Senate floor, Sen. Jay Rockefeller speech. c-span.org/video/?173141-1/senate-session, 9:08:00 (accessed: Oct. 2, 2023).
78. senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes /vote1072/vote_107_2_00237.htm (accessed: Oct. 2, 2023).
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Oct. 9, 2002, C-Span, live broadcast, Sen. John Warner relating a question on the Senate floor. c-span.org/video/?173118-1/senate-session, 6:10 (accessed: Oct. 2, 2023).
86. Sep. 16, 2002, CBS News, 'Face The Nation - 9/15/02' (transcript, the relevant one being of Sen. John Kerry)..
87. June 5, 2008, C-Span, 'Democratic Report on Prewar Intelligence'. Presentation by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. c-span.org/video/?205852-1/democratic-report-prewar-intelligence (accessed: Oct. 3, 2023).
88. Ibid.
89. Dec. 25, 1992, Los Angeles Times, 'Bush Pardons Weinberger, 5 Others in Iran-Contra; Act Called Cover-Up'.
90. 1982, Henry Kissinger, 'Years of Upheaval: The Second Volume of His Classic Memoirs', Chapter IV.
91. Nov. 7, 2002, George Shultz speech at Milton Friedman's 100th birthday (freetochoose.net/media_02_1.html (accessed: Aug. 9, 2023; PBS television series on Friedman)).
92. June 1, 1992, minneapolisfed.org, 'Interview with Milton Friedman'.
93. 2002, David Rockefeller, 'Memoirs', pp. 81-88
94. Sep. 13, 1970, New York Times.
95. July 30, 2006, Hoover.org, 'George Shultz, Father of the Bush Doctrine'.
96. 2004, James Mann (long-time L.A. Times and Washington Post journalist; ), 'Rise of the Vulcans'.
97. May/June 2009, Zbigniew Brzezinski for the CFR's Foreign Affairs, 'A Tale of Two Wars'.
98. Sep. 18, 2009, Daily Beast, 'How Obama Flubbed His Missile Message', interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski.
99. csis.org/scholars/alpha.htm (accessed: Nov. 8, 2001; Mann doesn't appear yet in the previous Oct. 10 webarchive): "Antony J. Blinken, Senior Fellow, Writer-in-Residence, International Security Program. ... James Mann, Senior Writer-in-Residence, International Security Program."
100. Youtube clip from C-Span, 'Dick Cheney ex-director of CFR talks to David Rockefeller', uploaded: November 30, 2006. youtube.com/watch?v=BbnpN07J_zg (accessed: Sep. 3, 2023). The clip was included in: 2004, John Birch Society, 'The Free Trade Area of The Americas.'.
101. Feb. 15, 2002, C-Span Live from a CFR meeting that opened the CFR's Geoeconomic Center, David Rockefeller to speaker Dick Cheney
102. See Condoleezza Rice's biography in ISGP's Managed Democracy for details and sources..
103. Jan. 7, 2006, Counterpunch, 'AIPAC on Trial'.
104. Ibid.
105. *) Over the years I have found nothing what Gene Wheaton said to be incorrect. On the contrary, over time everything he says seems to make perfect sense. Doesn't mean he doesn't have any ulterior motives, but his information seems to be reliable.
     *) January 4, 2002, Gene Wheaton, an intelligence insider and whistleblower since Iran-Contra, during an interview of Matt Ehling on Declassified Radio. For lengthy quote, see ISGP's Cercle article.
106. * Men working under deputy defense secretary Frank Carlucci all visited Ted Shackley's Cercle group.
     *) Gene Wheaton again (January 4, 2002, to Matt Ehling on Declassified Radio): "Ted Shackley and Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci and Ving West and a group of these guys used to have park-bench meetings in the late 70s in McClean, Virginia so nobody could overhear their conversations. They basically said, "With our expertise at placing dictators in power," I’m almost quoting verbatim one of their comments, "why don’t we treat the United States like the world’s biggest banana republic and take it over?" And the first thing they had to do was to get their man in the White House, and that was George Bush."
     *) 2005, Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror, pp. 124-125: "Turner's hiring of Frank Carlucci to replace Hank Knoche was manipulated by Shackley and Bush," William Corson said.3 Carlucci was close to Donald Rumsfeld, who had engineered Bush's appointment by President Ford. Carlucci also had total loyalty to General Richard Secord... and Erich von Marbod. ... According to Shirley Brill, Carlucci and Shackley were also very close friends. Shackley and Clines knew Carlucci from the Chile operations. ... Shackley, according to Soghanalian, had later worked with Calucci in setting up Portugal as a major arms transshipping point for the Middle East. "They played Turner like a violin to get Carlucci the job," Shirley Brill said. ... Weisz told him that "George Bush and James Angleton had been instrumental in putting Weisz where he was.""
     *) 2005, Joseph Trento, 'Prelude to Terror', p. 283: "In the early 1980s, George Bush helped Shackley get established in Kuwait and in the oil business as a consultant. Shackley started Theodore Shackley and Associates and several other companies, which he used as a cover for his work for Bush. For the first time in his life, he was making large amounts of money. … He even told friends that he still had hopes of becoming DCI someday in a future Bush administration. The admiration of Israel by the neocons was shared by Ted Shackley."
     *) 2001, Joseph Trento, 'The Secret History of the CIA', pp. 410, 426: "Colby understood - as did Kissinger and Ted Shackley... - that the Israeli account was a large source of Angleton's power. For one thing, it had given them access to five American presidents. ...
     For the government of Israel, the loss of James Angleton was a major blow, but one for which it was prepared. The Israelis had other friends in the U.S. intelligence community. Colby and Kissinger's changes in the CIA included cutbacks in Clandestine Services, as a result of which many of the CIA's most experienced officers were out of work and embittered. ...
     Meanwhile, Shackley made the Israeli account his own. He kept the relationship personal, as Angleton had done. According to Crowley and other Agency officials, Shackley told no one in the chain of command anything he was doing with respect to Israel. ...
     [Shackley] introduced George Bush to many of his old Cuban friends in Miami. A decade earlier, they had been the heart of the CIA's anti-Castro effort. Now, they were a powerful political force Bush could use in his quest to fulfill political ambitions that went beyond the CIA."
     *) George H. W. Bush was a senior counselor of the Carlyle Group 1993-2003, under the chairmanship during all this time of Frank Carlucci.
     *) 2002, Volume XXV, Number 1 and 2, AFIO magazine Periscope: "2001 donors [life members]: ... Inman, Bobby R. ... Gittinger, John W. ... Hugel, Max ... Jenkins, Carl E. ... Schlesinger, James R. ... Shackley, Theodore ... Spencer, Jr. Thomas R. ... Wannall, W. Raymond ... Webster, William H. ... Wedemeyer, Albert D. ... 26 Anonymous Donors... Special volunteers of time & talent: ... Shackley, Ted; Spencer, Jr., Thomas R. ... New Member Sponsors for 2001: ... Angleton, James ... Critchfield, James; Critchfield, Lois ... Spencer, Thomas ... Corporate partners 2001: Du Pont Investment Bankers, Hill & Associates, Institute of World Politics, ... Lockheed Martin (M&DS), ... Motorola, ... SAIC, ... TRW. ... Current Members of the AFIO Board of Directors: Honorary Board of Directors: Co-Chairmen: Hon. George H. W. Bush; Hon. Gerald R. Ford; Mr. John Barron; Hon. Shirley Temple Black; Hon. Frank C. Carlucci; Dr. Ruth M. Davis; Adm. Bobby R. Inman, USN (Ret); Professor Ernest R. May; Mr. John Anson Smith; Hon. William H. Webster; Hon. R. James Woolsey. ... Board Members: ... Mr. Theodore G. Shackley; Thomas R. Spencer Jr., Esq. ... Present Board Members Re-elected for Another Term in 2002: Ted Shackley (Ret)... Officers: President: Mr. S. Eugene Poteat [confirmed Gulf of Tonkin incident was used by White House as a false flag event.]"
107. Oct. 15, 2002, Los Angeles Times, 'Perle's Passion Is Served': "Jackson had gathered a brain trust that included Perle, Wolfowitz, Frank Gaffney ... and Charles Horner, now at the Hudson Institute."
108. Ibid.
109. Ibid.
110. 1998, Anne Cahn, 'Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA', p. 150.
111. Ibid., p. 148.
112. 2008, Justin Vaisse (adjunct professor Sciences Po 1999-2007, SAIS at Johns Hopkins University 2007-2013; senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution around 2007-2013; director of Policy Planning at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2013-2019), 'Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement', p. 119: "In 1963 [Perle] attended the London School of Economics (where one of his classmates was Edward Luttwak…) … Wohlstetter, Nitze and Acheson wanted to help Jackson defeat Symington and were in need of research assistance. In addition to Perle, they hired… Paul Wolfowitz, the son of celebrated mathematician Jacob Wolfowitz, with whom Wohlstetter himself had studied. (Two other researchers would later be added to the staff: Peter Wilson and Edward Luttwak.)"
113. Ibid. And: Nov. 11, 1985, Los Angeles Times, 'Perle Wages Behind-the-Scenes Crusade Against Kremlin: Soviets' Mortal Foe Lurks at Pentagon': "Perle interrupted his studies at USC to spend the 1962-63 academic year at the London School of Economics. His roommate was Edward N. Luttwak..."
114. Dec. 6, 2002, The Guardian, 'Democrat hawk whose ghost guides Bush: Scoop Jackson's body is 20 years in the grave but his spirit goes marching on': "Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith ... and Richard Perle ... are all former Democrats who worked for Jackson in the 70s, and looked on him as their mentor."
115. Ibid.: "This week President Bush put another Jackson protege, Elliott Abrams, in charge of White House policy in the Middle East."
116. Report of the Conference to Plan a Strategy for Peace, p. 132, but not clear from which year.
117. Ibid.
118. *) BBC, 'Project for the New American Century' (news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/ panorama/3032147.stm (accessed: March 24, 2010; original date unknown)): "The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was founded in 1997 by the right wing thinkers William Kristol and Robert Kagan."
     *) newamericancentury.org/ aboutpnac.htm (accessed: Feb. 5, 2002): "The Project is an initiative of the New Citizenship Project (501c3); the New Citizenship Project's chairman is William Kristol... Project Directors: William Kristol, Chairman."
119. March 22, 1974, Wall Street Journal, 'Encounter Magazine of Britain to Be Sold To Illinois Publisher; Prestigious Literary Monthly, Once Funded by the CIA, Is Set to Go to Carus Corp.': "Encounter was founded in London in 1953 by Irving Kristol and Stephen Spender and, for its first 10 years, its deficits were underwritten by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which Mr. Lasky described as a CIA front."
120. Dec. 20, 2018, New York Post, 'Ex-official with ties to McCain gave BuzzFeed access to Steele dossier: court filing': "A BuzzFeed reporter got the dossier ... during a meeting with David Kramer, a McCain Institute fellow and former deputy assistant secretary of state, according to the court document."
121. *) June 1, 2009, Senza Soste (Livorno, Italy), 'Giancarlo Valori, il nuovo capo della P2 ricevuto in pompamagna a Livorno' ('Giancarlo Valori, the new head of the P2, received in grand style in Livorno'): "The shareholders' meeting of Italintesa SpA awarded him the honorary presidency of the company. Among the shareholders are the American political scientist Edward Luttwak, a former consultant of Italintesa and regular columnist in the papers of the Gruppo Monti and Sicilian Gazzetta del Sud. Like Valori, Luttwak has a contiguous past involving the Atlantic powers that is more or less hidden."
     *) September 16, 2008, Farnesina: Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale, 'Press release detail': "At 9:15 tomorrow morning Minister for Foreign Affairs Franco Frattini will open the sessions of the conference "Italy, Europe and Israel: how to build a privileged partnership" arranged by the Aspen Institute and held in the International Conference Room of the foreign ministry in Rome. ... In addition to Israeli Minister of Welfare Isaac Herzog, who will also hold a meeting with Minister Frattini, other participants are to include ... Minister for Economic and Financial Affairs Tremonti and former Minister for Foreign Affairs Massimo D'Alema, business world such as Carlo De Benedetti [protege of the Agnellis], Piero Gnudi, Giancarlo Elia Valori, and journalism, including Renato Mannheimer, Edward Luttwak, Arrigo Levi, as well as major representatives of the Jewish community such as Chief Rabbi Di Segni and President of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities Gattegna." Luttwak and Valori (Le Cercle, P2, and major behind-the-scenes player in Italy) both have also been involved in the company Italintesa.
122. 2014, Johannes Grossmann, 'Die Internationale der Konservativen. Transnationale Elitenzirkel und private Außenpolitik in Westeuropa seit 1945', p. 544: "Aus Italien stiessen in den 1980er Jahren lediglich der fruhere Generalkommandant der Carabinieri, Umberto Cappuzzo, und der evenfalls in Vaduzer Institut engagierte Giancarlo Valori zum Cercle"
123. June 1, 2009, Senza Soste (Livorno, Italy), 'Giancarlo Valori, il nuovo capo della P2 ricevuto in pompamagna a Livorno' ('Giancarlo Valori, the new head of the P2, received in grand style in Livorno'): "Valori enrolled in the P2 (card 283) and with Licio Gelli he is one of the instigators of the reactionary right in the period of the new Argentine president Peron, in which they create the conditions for the military dictatorship of 1976-1983 [of Videla and the P2's Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera]. But Gelli, on the pretext of his frequent Vatican visits, expels Valori ​​from the P2, to successfully become the main reference point for politicians in Buenos Aires. Valori ​​doesn't mind that much and continues his frequent visits to the intelligence community and the underbelly of politics. He knows [SISMI head] General [Giuseppe] Santovito, also a P2 member; [P2 member] Mino Pecorelli, [the Banco Ambrosiano and Bologno bombing-linked] Francesco Pazienza and other protagonists of the conspiracies in those years. Because these ties are certainly not ordinary among Italian managers and entrepreneurs, Valori is repeatedly called to testify in key investigations of the early 80s, those of the Rome prosecutors into the P2, of Judge Carlo Palermo into arms trafficking, of Rosario Priore's report on his relations with the Arab countries, in the context of the investigation into the massacre of Ustica. ... In 1981, when the P2 lists are discovered, Giancarlo Elia Valori is the only one who has been "expelled", so the investigation only touches him marginally. It is said that Tina Anselmi, president of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry [into the P2 Lodge], absolutely doesn't want to talk about him: "I have nothing to say about that gentleman." ... Valori ​​likes to present himself as a professor of international politics and his views are similar to those of the far right Zionists. And he is one of the sponsors of the grotesque Islamic repentent Magdi Allam, and a theorist of a clash of civilizations against Islam. In the preface of a book of Allam he writes: "It is the defense of Israel that is the new platform of European and US grand strategy... The book of Magdi Allam is a good start for this project." He is firmly opposed to the idea of ​​a Palestinian state, indeed, the very idea of ​​Palestinian people: "We need to change the register: Palestine, which does not exist as a geopolitical entity, is not the solution, but the problem. Speaking of the Palestinian people … means accepting their independence, at least in semantics." Valori ​​proposes the attribution to Israel of most of the occupied territories, while the Gaza Strip and the West Bank should be assigned respectively to Egypt and Jordan."
124. 1976, Pike Report, pp. 112-113: "Upon hearing testimony from Helms in February 1973, Senator Church's Multinational Corporations Subcommittee informed the CIA on 21 February 1973 that it had found “significant discrepancies” between Helms’s testimony and data ITT had supplied. On that same day, Theodore Shackley (Chief, Western Hemisphere Division, DP) took the first step to limit damage to the Agency. He recommended to DCI Schlesinger that the Agency should work [through Senators Stennis or Symington who "could be persuaded" to agree to a "controlled appearance" for the DCI before the Multinational Corporations Subcommitte] …  Two days later, on 23 February 1973, Agency officers began quiet efforts with the help of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a close friend of the CIA, to blunt Senator Church's scrutiny of CIA, Chile, and Richard Helms. Jackson offered his protective assistance in a remarkable backstage meeting he had with Ted Shackley and CIA Congressional liaison chief John Maury the next day. … [Jackson made several suggestions on how to protect the CIA, as written down by Shackley] … Jackson pledged to work with CIA "to see that we got this protection." Shackley noted that Senator Jackson, who had been "extremely helpful," believed that it was "essential" to prevent the establishing of any procedure that could call upon CIA to testify before a wide variety of Congressional committees. Following that meeting, Shackley and Maury at once briefed Colby, who was then CIA's Executive Director, and Tom Keramessines, the DDP. DCI Schlesinger then asked Senator Jackson to set the wheels in motion for Senator McClellan to call a special meeting of his Oversight Committee. Three weeks later, on 13 March, CIA’s senatorial friends arranged to shield the Agency from unwanted scrutiny… McClellan, Symington, Jackson, John Pastore (D-RI), Strom Thurmond (R-SC, and Roman Hruska R-NE). Colby, Shackley, and Maury accompanied DCI Schlesinger." p. 173: "[CIA legal counsel Mitchell] Rogovin … accused Pike's staff of having stolen a copy of the [Ted Shackley] memorandum outlining the sensitive meeting of CIA officers with Senator "Scoop" Jackson in May 1973…"
125. May 20, 2007, The American Prospect, 'The Apprentice'.
126. Sep. 8, 2006, Senate Committee on Intelligence, 'The Use by the Intelligence Community of Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress', pp. 5-6.
127. Ibid.
128. March 22, 1974, Wall Street Journal, 'Encounter Magazine of Britain to Be Sold To Illinois Publisher; Prestigious Literary Monthly, Once Funded by the CIA, Is Set to Go to Carus Corp.'.
129. S. Hrg. 103-296. Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States, nomination of R. James Woolsey to be director of Central Intelligence, Tuesday, February 2, and Wednesday, February 3, 1993, p. 32: "Member, Smithsonian Associates, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1974-Present. ... Friends of the National Zoo, National Zoological Park, Member, 1975-Present. ... Regent, Smithsonian Institution, 1990-Present. ... The Atlantic Council of the United States, Director, 1992-Present, 1981-1989. ... Center for Strategic & International Studies, Member, Board of Trustees, 1988-1989 & 1991-Present. ... Council on Foreign Relations, Member, 1975-Present. ... Senator CHAFEE. Mr. Chairman, I would also like to add that we have an extraordinary array of Rhodes Scholars here today. It seems to be a Mafia that has suddenly taken over the Administration. And as- I watched Senator Lugar praise Mr. Woolsey, I thought there was a connection there. Senator JOHNSTON. It's called the "Old Boy Network." Senator CHAFEE. That's right. I don't know what the secret, grip is, but -- [General laughter.] ... Senator KERREY of Nebraska. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. - Ambassador Woolsey, you may have noted earlier that -I am not a Rhodes Scholar, and in fact many people in Nebraska-wonder how it is possible for me to serve on any Committee called the Intelligence Committee. [General laughter.] ... Chairman DECONCINI: ... [Woolsey's] academic and professional credentials are impeccable. A graduate of Stanford, where he became a Rhodes scholar, with a graduate degree from Oxford and a law degree from Yale Law School"
130. Ibid.
131. August 2, 1989, CSIS board document. (PDF)
132. S. Hrg. 103-296. Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States, nomination of R. James Woolsey to be director of Central Intelligence, Tuesday, February 2, and Wednesday, February 3, 1993, p. 32: "Clients Billed More than $500 Worth of My Services Durina Past 5 Years: - Aerospace Corporation - Bell Communications Research, - Bolt, Baranek & Newman - The Carlyle Group - Center for Strategic & International Studies - Center for Naval Analysis - Clean Sites - Cornell University - DynCorp.- - Fairchild Industries. - . General Dynamics - Insilco - Litton Industries - Martin Marietta Corporation - McDonnell Douglas Corporation - M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory - NationalAcademy of Sciences - National Security-Council - Newmont - Penn -Central Corporation - Plessey, - Rockwell -International Corporation - SAIC - Shack & Kimball - Southern Steamship Ltd. - Thiokol - Thomson, CSF - The Titan Corporation - United Technologies Corporation - Young & Rubicam." Also lists directorships in some of these corporations.
133. *) S. Hrg. 103-296. Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States, nomination of R. James Woolsey to be director of Central Intelligence, Tuesday, February 2, and Wednesday, February 3, 1993: "Includes also: "Joint Strategic Targetting and Planning Staff, Scientific Advisory Group, Offutt AFB, Nebraska, 68113, advisor, 1987-1988.""
     *) Suzanne Woolsey: Wife of James Woolsey. BA Stanford psychology. Doctorate in Social and Clinical Psychology from Harvard. Research program director at the Rockefeller-funded Urban Institute 1975-1977, with trustees over the years as Katharine Graham, Cyrus Vance, John Deutch, Warren Buffett (close to Larry King of Franklin Affair and Offutt - see ISGP's 9/11 article for details), Robert McNamara, Carla Hills, Henry G. Cisneros and Vernon Jordan (Lazard). Partner of Coopers & Lybrand 1980-1989. Married to James Woolsey around 1970. 1977, Government Research Corporation, National Journal, p. 256: "[Suzanne Woolsey] had been on the staff of the Urban Institute for two years..." Associate director U.S. Office of Management and Budget 1977-1980. Executive director of the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council 1989-1993. Chief Operating Officer of the NAS/NRC 1993-2000. Chief communications officer NAS/NRC 2001-2003.
134. S. Hrg. 103-296. Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States, nomination of R. James Woolsey to be director of Central Intelligence, Tuesday, February 2, and Wednesday, February 3, 1993, p. 32: "Jamestown Foundation. Director 1986-1989. ... Member, board of Advisors: 1992-Present. Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs: Member, Advisory Board 1988-1989, 1991-Present."
135. *) Senator Henry Jackson was a co-founder and early board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (according to a 2011 JINSA email to ISGP).
     *) December 14, 1986, Gadsden Times, 'Conservative scholar believed key figure in Iran deal': "Ledeen has been identified in Israel and in the United States as being a key player in the initial talks that eventually resulted in the sale of weapons – through Israel – to Iran in the summer of 1985. … Ledeen’s name was also raised in connection with a 1985 meeting with arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian expatriate, who, along with Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian, were middlemen in the deals. … Ledeen told associates that he met Ghorbanifar several times in Europe between July and December 1985, the Chicago Tribune reported a month ago. … Israeli officials in Jerusalem said Ledeen told former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in the early spring of 1985 that the United States wanted to re-establish contact with Iran. … Hours after speaking with Ledeen, peres talked to Al Schwimmer, the U.S.-born founder of Israel Aircraft Industries, according to a report in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. … It was Schwimmer’s idea to bater weapons for Buckley’s freedom, and Schwimmer turned for help to Israeli arms dealer Yaacov Nimrodi, according to the paper. Ledeen is a founder of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs." February 2, 1987, Boca Raton News, p. 3A: "[Michael] Ledeen said he has spent a month in Israel on two occasions, staying with his family at quarters furnished at favorable rates by the privately funded Jerusalem Foundation. He said he has been an editor and board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which advocates close U.S.-Israeli military ties."
136. *) Jackson and Cline were both involved in the American Security Council.
     *) 2006, Joseph Trento, 'Prelude to Terror', p. 283: "The admiration of Israel by the neocons was shared by Ted Shackley. One of Shackley's friends and business associates was Michael Ledeen... Lawrence Walsh, the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, wrote in his book 'Firewall': "Ledeen was more than a messenger. He had pressed McFarlane to open discussion with (Shimon) Peres and had become the Washington spokesman for the Israeli arms merchants and Ghorbanifar. It was Ledeen who would use Shackley--and his influence with Bush--to orchestrate what would become the arms-for-hostages scheme with Israel as a partner. Ledeen was a certified good guy to the private intelligence network. He had lobbied hard against the prosecution of Tom Clines and Richard Secord over EATSCO."
     *) In 1980, Ledeen worked for the Italian military intelligence service as a "risk assessment" consultant. In 1981, Michael Ledeen then became Special Adviser to secretary of state Alexander Haig.
     *) July 2006, Vanity Fair, 'The War They Wanted, the Lies They Needed': "The first took place in 1980, when Francesco Pazienza, a charming and sophisticated Propaganda Due operative at the highest levels of SISMI, allegedly teamed up with an American named Michael Ledeen, a Rome correspondent for The New Republic. According to The Wall Street Journal, Pazienza said he first met Ledeen that summer, through a SISMI agent in New York who was working under the cover of a U.N. job. ... A 1985 investigation by Jonathan Kwitny in The Wall Street Journal reported that the New Republic article was part of a larger disinformation scam run by Ledeen and SISMI to tilt the election, and that “Billy Carter wasn’t the only one allegedly getting money from a foreign government.” According to Pazienza, Kwitny reported, Michael Ledeen had received at least $120,000 from SISMI in 1980 or 1981 for his work on Billygate [with Arnaud de Borchgrave] and other projects. Ledeen even had a coded identity, Z-3, and had money sent to him in a Bermuda bank account, Pazienza said. Ledeen told the Journal that a consulting firm he owned, I.S.I., worked for SISMI and may have received the money. He said he did not recall whether he had a coded identity. ... Pazienza was subsequently convicted in absentia on multiple charges, including having used extortion and fraud to obtain embarrassing facts about Billy Carter. Ledeen was never charged with any crime, but he was cited in Pazienza’s indictment, which read, “With the illicit support of the SISMI and in collaboration with the well-known American ‘Italianist’ Michael Ledeen, Pazienza succeeded in extorting, also using fraudulent means, information … on the Libyan business of Billy Carter, the brother of the then President of the United States.” In an interview with Vanity Fair, Ledeen denied having worked with Pazienza or Propaganda Due as part of a disinformation scheme. “I knew Pazienza,” he explained. “I didn’t think P-2 existed. I thought it was all nonsense—typical Italian fantasy.” He added, “I’m not aware that anything in [the Billygate] story turned out to be false.” Asked if he had worked with SISMI, Ledeen told Vanity Fair, “No,” then added, “I had a project with SISMI—one project.” He described it as a simple “desktop” exercise in 1979 or 1980, in which he taught Italian intelligence how to deal with U.S. officials on extradition matters. His fee, he said, was about $10,000."
     *) 2005, Daniele Ganser, 'Nato's Secret Armies', pp. 74-75: "Frank Gigliotti [Presbyterian/Methodist priest; one-time assistant to a hypnotist; worked with teenaged boys, for whom he organized a social club with the peculiar name Giuseppe Mazzini Club; OSS Italy; Mason] of the US Masonic Lodge personally recruited Gelli and instructed him to set up an anti-Communist parallel government in Italy in close cooperation with the CIA station in Rome. 'It was Ted Shackley [Le Cercle], director of all covert operations of the CIA in Italy in the 1970s', an internal report of the Italian anti-terrorism unit confirmed, 'who presented the chief of the Masonic Lodge to Alexander Haig'. According to the document, Nixon's Military adviser General Haig [later Pilgrims Society executive], who had commanded US troops in vietnam and thereafter from 1974 to 1979 served as NATO's SACEUR, and Nixon's National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger [Pilgrims Society; Le Cercle] 'authorized Gelli in the fall of 1969 to recruit 400 high ranking Italian and NATO officers into his lodge'. (60)
137. *) 1993, JINSA, 'Security Affairs', p. 12: "Officers: ... Vice Chairman - Morris J. Amitay [executive director AIPAC] ... Advisory Board: Amb. Max Kampelman, Chr.; Douglas Feith, Vice Chr., ... The Hon. Jack Kemp, The Hon. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, ... Prof. Michael Ledeen, ... Joshua Muravchik, The Hon. Richard Perle, ... Prof. Eugene V, Rostow, Adm. Sumner Shapiro (Ret.), ... Gen. John Vogt (Ret.), Adm. Elmo Zumwalt (Ret.). ... Amb. Paul D. Wolfowitz, now Co-Chairman of JINSA's Board of Advisors... "
     *) JINSA website, advisory council (accessed: July 11, 2001): "Hon. John Bolton ... Hon. Dick Cheney ... Adm. David Jeremiah ... Amb. max M. Kampelman ... Hon. Jack Kemp ... Dr. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick ... Prof. Michael Ledeen ... The Hon. Richard Perle ... Prof. Eugene Rostow ... R. Adm. Sumner Shapiro ... Hon. R. James Woolsey." Bolton and Cheney gone by December 18 checkup, but the rest is still there. Bolton later returned to the board.
138. January 18, 2012, Forward magazine, 'JINSA Leadership in Flux After Ouster Perle and Woolsey Quit Hawkish Jewish Security Think Tank': "The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs recently terminated the second-highest-ranking staff member, who has been with the organization for more than three decades. The move, a culmination of months of internal struggle, prompted several conservative icons to quit the group’s advisory board in protest. Among those turning their back on JINSA were former CIA director James Woolsey, former top Pentagon official Richard Perle and neoconservative figure Michael Ledeen. ... JINSA, was founded in 1976, three years after Israel’s Yom Kippur War; one of its main goals was to ensure strong military cooperation between the United States and Israel by educating the American defense establishment on Israel’s strategic importance. ... News of JINSA’s troubled internal relations surfaced January 10 with the announcement that Shoshana Bryen, until recently senior director for security policy, had joined the Jewish Policy Center, an up-and-coming conservative Jewish think tank associated with the Republican Jewish Coalition. The statement marked the end of a months-long battle between Bryen and her bosses. Bryen had been at JINSA for 32 years and, according to a prominent lay leader, was considered its “public face.” She served as JINSA’s executive director from 1981 to 1991 and is credited with transforming the organization from a small think tank into a player in the Washington conservative scene. She later took charge of issues relating to defense policies and was the main author of the group’s reports and position papers. Bryen’s blunt analysis of the Middle East gave her a reputation as a hawkish straight shooter, short on nuance and willing to take on the conventional wisdom. For instance, she opposed talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization even when negotiations were endorsed by a Republican administration; even now, defying much of the rhetoric of supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, she thinks an Israeli attack on Iran is unlikely. It is this style that, according to a key JINSA lay leader, got Bryen in trouble. Accounts provided to the Forward by board members and individuals close to the organization, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the personal nature of the dispute, portrayed a tense relationship between Bryen and JINSA’s president, David Ganz, a successful Boston businessman who is also the group’s largest single donor. The two have sparred over issues relating to JINSA’s future and the focus of its programs. Officials involved with the group said that Ganz viewed Bryen’s direct style and her open opposition to decisions made by the board as problematic."
139. See ISGP's article on the supranational suspects behind 9/11 for details.