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Prince of Darkness: Deals in the
shadows
By Jason Leopold
Richard
Perle’s resignation Thursday as chairman of the Defense
Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group, is long
overdue. Perle quit the chairmanship amid controversy
centered around his position as a retainer for bankrupt
telecommunications firm Global
Crossing
which hired him to the potential tune of US$725,000 to
win approval from the US Department of Defense for Hong
Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing to buy the company. A
growing chorus of critics and lawmakers decried Perle,
nicknamed Prince of Darkness, as putting himself in a
situation with a significant conflict of interest. This
is anything but terra incognita for Perle, who has
resigned from a previous post as assistant secretary of
defense in April 1987 - amid complaints of conflicts of
interest.
Global Crossing presumably hired
Perle, former assistant secretary of defense under
Ronald Reagan, as a lobbyist because he wields an
enormous amount of power around the Pentagon. Perle is
one of the biggest hawks in the nest: key adviser to
buddy and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a
leading architect and proponent of the Bush
administration’s bellicose policies toward Iraq.
The Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation objected to Global Crossing’s sale to Hong
Kong's Hutchison Whampoa, which was accused last year by
Perle's fellow hawks of being a front for China's
People's Liberation Army. The FBI was concerned because
the US government uses Global Crossing’s fiber-optics
networks and a sale would put the networks under control
of the Chinese government. Global Crossing said it would
pay Perle $125,000 plus an additional $600,000 if the
deal went through.
Perle denied Thursday that
his unpaid advisory role on the policy board would have
interfered with his lobbying on behalf of Global
Crossing, which is mired in shareholder lawsuits as a
result of its questionable accounting practices. But
Perle has a long history of using his influential role
as a government adviser to line his pockets.
Earlier this very month, Pulitzer-prize-winning
investigative journalist Seymour M Hersh published a
story in the New Yorker entitled "Lunch with the
Chairman". Hersh's piece focused on a lunch in France
between Perle and Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi
industrialist. The lunch was arranged by freewheeling
Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi, one of the stars
of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan
administration. Hersh alleged that Perle was engaging in
fundraising for Trireme Partners LP, a venture-capital
company specializing in homeland security/defense. Perle
is a managing partner at Trireme.
“Richard Perle
… has made a lucrative career out of some bald conflicts
of interest,” wrote Mark Crispin Miller, a New York
University media professor, in the Free Press in 2000.
“As an Assistant Secretary of Defense for International
Security under Ronald Reagan, he got in some slight
trouble when he wrote a memorandum urging the department
to consider buying equipment from a company that had
paid him a $50,000 consulting fee (as the the New York
Times noted back in 1984). As chairman and CEO of
Hollinger Digital (owned by media titan Conrad Black),
Perle maintains his close connections with the military
industries. For example, as a non-executive director of
Morgan Crucible, PLC (UK), which has done business with
the Pentagon ...”
Moreover, Perle was also a
director of Memorex Corp, a defense contractor, in the
1990s while he was advising then-secretary of defense
Dick Cheney as a member of the Defense Policy Board
Advisory Committee during the first Bush administration.
At the same time, Perle also was a paid consultant to a
Turkish-hired lobbying firm in Washington and has been
both an adviser to FMC Corp and a director of an
FMC-Turkish joint venture building military equipment.
It should be noted that during Perle’s tenure in the
Reagan administration he was a fierce proponent of aid
to Turkey’s military.
In 1987, the Pentagon’s
Office of General Counsel opened an inquiry into whether
Perle’s attempts to write a fictional novel based on
classified intelligence information constituted a
conflict of interest. At the time, Perle was offered a
$300,000 advance for the novel, titled Memoranda.
The proposal for the novel described an inside
look at the bureaucracy and promised a plot that seemed
a thinly veiled account of Perle's long-running
internecine struggle with former assistant secretary of
state Richard R Burt. It promised “an array of
bureaucratic maneuvers recounted in the context of
actual events altered only enough to make them
publishable, to preserve the fiction in
Memoranda".
In April of 1987, Senator Sam
Nunn (Democrat-Georgia), the former ranking Democrat on
the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote an angry
letter to Reagan suggesting that Perle’s book “creates a
climate encouraging disrespect for the protection of
classified information” and might have “a chilling
effect on the candor of [officials'] policy analysis and
recommendations”. Nunn also raised questions about the
propriety of the sale of the book during Perle's tenure
in office.
In response to the inquiries, Perle
resigned his post as assistant secretary of defense in
April 1987 to write the book. The title was later
changed to Hard Line.
Perle will stay on
as an adviser to the Defense Policy Board. But by
relinquishing the chairmanship, he will not be bound by
the same governement ethics code.
Jason
Leopold was the Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow
Jones Newswires. He is currently finishing a book on the
California energy crisis.
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