I've been keeping notes from different articles (mostly info from Karen Kwiatkowski) about the
Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon. I hear lots of talk about the WH Iraq Group, but I've got my eye, as do others, on the Office of Special Plan.
I wanted to try to keep up with all the names to see if any surfaced in the Fitzgerald investigation. Wurmser is one. Thought these notes might be of interest.
Notes:
1. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, adamant hawks, rename the Northern Gulf Affairs Office on the Pentagon's fourth floor (in the seventh corridor of D Ring) the "Office of Special Plans" (OSP) and increase its four-person staff to sixteen. [Knight Ridder Newspapers, 8/16/02; Los Angeles Times, 11/24/02; New Yorker, 5/5/03; Inter Press Service, 8/7/03; American Conservative, 12/1/03; Tom Paine [.com], 8/27/03; Mother Jones, 1/04 Sources: Greg Thielmann, Karen Kwiatkowski
- The OSP bypasses established oversight procedures by sending its intelligence assessments directly to the White House and National Security Council without having them first vetted by a review process involving other US intelligence agencies. [Guardian, 7/17/03; Salon, 7/16/03; New Yorker, 5/5/03; Mother Jones, 1/04 Sources: Greg Thielmann, David Obey
- Their contacts in other agencies include: John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International; Bolton's advisor, David Wurmser, a former research fellow on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute, who was just recently working in a secret Pentagon planning unit at Douglas Feith's office, and Elizabeth Cheney, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs; Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser; Elliott Abrams, The National Security Council's top Middle East aide; and Richard Perle, Newt Gingrich, James Woolsey and Kenneth Adelman of the Defense Policy Board. The office provides very little information about its work to other US intelligence offices.
- During the run-up to the Iraq war, Gingrich often came up for closed-door meetings with William Luti, who in 1996 had served as a congressional fellow in Speaker of the House Gingrich's office.
- OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. OSP's activities were a complete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."
- Forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office
- VP Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam.
- When Cheney was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was.
- Newt Gingrich resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title.
- William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Cheney, runs the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence undersecretary and a former Reagan official.
- The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress (Chalabi)
- "Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.
- Longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode - officially assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall.
- Other names: Michael Rubin and David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI
- Adding another layer of dubious quality to the endeavor was the man partnered with Wurmser, F. Michael Maloof, former aide to Perle
- The new unit's (OSP) director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton.
- According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.
- Navy Lt. Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, who was a special assistant to Luti. "His job was to peruse the Arabic-language media to find articles that would incriminate Saddam Hussein about terrorism, and he translated these."
- As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in Colonel Bruner.
- The Pentagon announces that the Office of Special Plans will revert to its previous name, the "Northern Gulf Affairs Office". (I believe this was in July or August 2003.)