On Friday, September 18th, a letter was written to our current president, signed by no less than seven former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, asking him to halt the investigation into the agency.
Dear Mr. President:
We have served as Directors of Central Intelligence or Directors of the CIA for Presidents reaching back over 35 years. We respectfully urge you to exercise your authority to reverse Attorney General Holder’s August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations that took place following the attacks of September 11.
The problem with the letter is the conflict of interest inherent in its signatories. William Webster, for example, founded the firm Diligence LLC which exploited the wars associated with the torture investigation.
Webster is no stranger preventing the investigation of dubious activities by the CIA. In the late 80's, he helped cover up the Iran-Contra investigation.
Judge William Webster obstructed the Walsh investigation of Iran-Contra, particularly the case against a high-ranking operations officer who was responsible for illegal arms deliveries to the Contras. The officer was indicted by a Grand Jury for making false statements and obstructing the investigations of the CIA’s Inspector General as well as the work of the Tower Commission, but the case was dismissed after Webster refused to release necessary documents.
In place of justice, the former CIA director would ask for the nation’s trust.
A bill that would set up an independent Inspector General is pending in Congress, and Mr. Webster appeared to be moving quickly to head off the idea, which has long been opposed by the agency on security grounds. He said he intended to strengthen the agency's own inspector general's office by making a stint there mandatory for officials interested in senior management positions, and he promised to increase the size of the investigative staff and improve its training.
...It was Mr. Webster's hope that the release of the statement, coupled with the dismissal of two agency officials and the disciplining of others implicated in the Iran-contra affair, would end what he has termed ''a testing chapter in the history of the C.I.A.''
...Mr. Webster spoke often of the need to rebuild trust of his agency, both in Congress and among the American people. He said he well understood the problems posed by maintaining a secret intelligence agency within a democracy premised on the idea of open debate. ''If you can't trust an agency like ours,'' said Mr. Webster, ''you're in trouble, because we are going to do a lot of things that we can't tell you about.''
Webster’s statement in 1988, when trying to stop the investigation into the Iran-Contra episode, could have been recycled and applied to the current DOJ case, which centers on the potential unlawful interrogation of detainees. The most infamous site of the alleged activity is at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The question which should be asked of Webster, then, is where he was in 2003 when these abuses occurred.
For a ranked retired intelligence officer, a profitable place to be following the invasion was with a private military company located in Iraq. An even more lucrative position was owning one.
Diligence first set up shop in Baghdad last July [2003] to provide security for companies involved in Iraqi reconstruction. In December, it established a new subsidiary called Diligence Middle East, and expanded its services to include screening, vetting and training of local hires, and the provision of daily intelligence briefs for its corporate clients. One of its co-chairmen is Joe Allbaugh, President George W Bush's campaign manager in 2000. In late 2003 Diligence sold a 40 percent stake in its new subsidiary to Mohammed al-Sagar, a wealthy Kuwaiti who also runs the Foreign Relations Committee of Kuwait's parliament. Last month, it quietly announced it had formed a joint venture with New Bridge Strategies, a consulting company headed by Joe Allbaugh and Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers, which was established in 2003 to advise companies on business deals in postwar Iraq.
Diligence was founded by William Webster, the only man to head both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Baker, its chief executive officer, spent 14 years at the CIA as a covert field operations officer specializing in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Whitley Bruner, its chief operating officer in Baghdad, was once the CIA station chief in Iraq. Shortly before the US invasion, he directed a covert operation for the Bush administration to convince high-ranking generals loyal to Saddam Hussein to cooperate with US forces. Although that management team sounds formidable, it's Diligence's directors and advisers who are the real power in the firm.
Richard Burt, the chairman, is the former US ambassador to Germany and a key adviser to the Carlyle Group, the Washington private equity fund where Bush's father, George H W Bush, worked for the past seven years. Ed Rogers, Diligence's vice chairman, was one of Bush Sr's top assistants when he was US president. Among Diligence's senior advisers are John Major, the former British prime minister and chairman of Carlyle Europe; Ed Mathias, Carlyle's managing director; and Lord Charles Powell, a former foreign-policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher.
Diligence and its partner New Bridge were deeply connected to the power brokers in Washington. In addition to the relationships listed above, New Bridge staffed Neil Bush, the president’s brother as a consultant. New Bridge also had direct ties to the administration.
New Bridge's director, Lanny Griffith, who serves as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, "was national chairman for the Bush/Cheney entertainment task force and coordinated entertainment for the 2001 Bush Inaugural".
He was, typically enough, one of the 2004 Bush campaign's "Rangers" - an elite group of fundraisers, each of whom was responsible for gathering up more than $200,000 for the president; while New Bridge Strategies' advisory board member Jamal Daniel is "a principal with Crest Investment Company" - a firm co-chaired by the president's younger brother Neil.
The companies used their political connections to score contracts for their clients.
Two businessmen instrumental in setting up New Bridge Strategies, a well-connected Washington firm designed to help clients win contracts in Iraq, have previously used an association with the younger brother of President George W. Bush to seek business in the Middle East, an FT investigation has found.
Diligence was also involved in arranging contacts between foreign agents and the CIA. One such notable encounter occurred began in the spring of 2004, when Diligence’s chief operating officer in Baghdad, Whitley Bruner, met with an Israeli agent, Shlomi Michaels. This man had connections to the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, and was pushing information which he promised would help get George W. Bush reelected later that year.
On a spring afternoon in 2004, up the street from the White House, former CIA officer Whitley Bruner was on his way to meet a new contact...Low-key and efficient, Bruner had retired from the Agency in late 1997 and in 2004 landed a job with the private intelligence outfit Diligence LLC.
...The intense stranger introduced himself as Shlomi Michaels. He was a former commando with Israel's elite internal counterterrorism force, the Yamam; he had since become one of the middlemen who work the seams between the worlds of security, intelligence, and international business, along with a few more colorful sidelines including a private investigations/security business in Beverly Hills. Even as ex-Israeli commandos turned security experts go, Bruner thought, this one seemed unusually well connected—his business partner was former Mossad head Danny Yatom.
...Michaels had a different proposition for the former CIA officer—one, he suggested, that could make the assembled men a handsome commission and even help President George W. Bush get reelected. He had a well-placed Iraqi source—a former officer in an Iraqi military psychological operations unit, he said—who had gathered hundreds of pages of contracts, maps, and photographs documenting meetings between Iraqi and Ukrainian officials. The information, Michaels said, would prove that Iraq had pursued a covert chemical weapons program. Michaels wanted Bruner to set up a meeting for him and the Iraqi source with the CIA. To turn over the whole dossier, he wanted $1 million.
Bruner would become the conduit of the Israeli agent and American intelligence. He set up a meeting between Michaels' Iraqi intelligence source and the CIA’s station chief in Amman, Jordan.
Michaels has appeared in Washington at key times over the past few years to engineer complicated international partnerships and shop politically useful information. By 2002, he was meeting with various Washington foreign policy hands in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel to discuss a joint venture to do business with the Iraqi Kurds; after the invasion, those talks left him well positioned to win lucrative reconstruction contracts handed out by the Kurdish government...In June 2004, during his last days in Iraq, US Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer sent three US military helicopters loaded with $1.4 billion in 100-dollar bills to Kurdistan, according to the Los Angeles Times. The money helped finance Kurdish infrastructure and development contracts that Michaels and his business partners then contracted with the Kurdish government to build and secure. What was Michaels' motivation in shopping the WMD dossier? No one claims to know. But, as Bruner puts it, "Everyone was aware that the Americans were sufficiently desperate and might pay big money for something not true."
Bruner asked to see some of Michaels' documents before agreeing to fly to Jordan to meet the Iraqi source. He says he was given Arabic-language contracts and "pictures of various Iraqis who were supposed to have been involved with weapons of mass destruction. There were photos of meetings, everybody sitting around a table at trade missions."
...A few days later Bruner was in the cigar bar of the Le Royal Hotel, a cement wedding cake of a building in bustling downtown Amman, meeting Michaels' mysterious Iraqi. Though still skeptical, he eventually decided to call up a former Langley colleague who was then serving as the CIA's Amman station chief. Soon after, Michaels and the Iraqi got their meeting with the Agency.
In 2006, Michaels came under investigation by the Israeli government for allegedly operating in Iraq without the required authorization from authorities.
At the focus of the investigation are Shlomi Michaels and Kodo, a firm registered in Switzerland but operating in Israel.
Sources familiar with the case say that a foreign-registered company that operates in Israel should be listed with the Company Registrar - and this is a matter that will also be investigated by the authorities.
Kodo and Michaels are suspected of selling equipment, know-how and technology, as well as providing security advisers from Israel, to groups and companies of Kurds operating in northern Iraq. One of the main operations in that region was setting up of a security apparatus for the Irbil airport.
It was reported that the airport deal was worth $300 million.
A year before the invasion of Iraq, Yatom and Michaels had formed an investment and security consulting company called the Interop Group (short for international operations group) that has since done millions of dollars of business in Kurdish Iraq. Michaels’ main business in Iraq is a joint venture called the Kurdish Development Organization, or KUDO. One American source describes Kudo as a joint venture between Michaels’ company and the Barzani part of a Kurdish governmental entity. According to a second American source, KUDO is a venture between Michaels, Schmidbauer, Yatom, and members of the powerful Barzani Iraqi Kurdish political family. According to this source, KUDO serves as a general service contractual liaison between the Kurdish Regional Government and the contractors for the massive $300 million project to build a new international airport in the Kurdish city of Irbil. The main contractor on the airport project is a Turkish company called Mak-yol. A third Michaels’ company, Coloseum Consulting, is registered in Switzerland as an affiliated company of Interop, according to Swiss federal corporate registration papers.
More covertly, the Israeli newspapers Yedioth Ahronoth and Haaretz have reported, Michaels has also brought in former Israeli military officers to provide counterterrorism training to Kurdish security forces at a secret "camp Z" in Iraq. Sources say the contract was mere "bupkas"—a few million dollars—and Michaels undertook the work out of friendship with then-Kurdish Minister of Interior and security chief Karim Sinjari, and also because the Kurds faced a threat from al Qaeda.
Webster was not alone on the list of signatories in profiting off the war. James Woosley, for example, was at the time the vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton.
Former CIA Director, James Woolsey, is a prime example of how the revolving door never stops spinning for this gang of war profiteers. After he left the CIA, Woolsey remained a senior advisor on intelligence and national security issues, and specifically the war in Iraq. When the war began, he worked for two private companies that did business in Iraq, and was a partner in a company that invested in firms that provide security and anti-terrorism services.
At the time, Woolsey was a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton. In that role, less than 2 months after the war began, he was a featured speaker at a May 2003 conference titled "Companies on the Ground: The Challenge for Business in Rebuilding Iraq," at which 80 corporate executives paid $1,100 to attend. He spoke about the many potential business opportunities in Iraq and about Bush's decision to steer reconstruction contracts to US firms.
With Woolsey in a Vice President position, Booz Allen became a subcontractor for a $75-million telecommunications contract in Iraq.
...Before the war, Woolsey was up to his neck in war planning. In addition to sitting on the DPB [Defense Policy Board] and giving direct advice to Rumsfeld, he was a founding member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), an organization set up by the WH in 2002 to help garner public support for going to war in Iraq.
Given the fact the multiple signatories to the letter were deeply involved in the exploitation of the Iraq war, it can be said at the very least that there is a conflict of interest in urging the Department of Justice shut down its case. At worst, it could be surmised that the men such as Webster, who helped kill the Iran-Contra inquiry, have subtly tipped their hand over whether we can trust an agency which has ‘done a lot of things they can’t tell us about’.