His client, sitting beside him in the scarlet jumpsuit of a high-security prisoner, had been part of an Iraqi resistance group nurtured and financed by the C.I.A. What can intelligence do to understand the genocide side of the war? Essentially your question is, what can be organized when you have these pieces fitting together? And thats all quite normal. But before I tell it, let me just say that probably throughout the day, those of you who have worked on these issues, particularly foreign policy issues with respect to those who served in other years of the Clinton administration, will perceive that things occur that seem surprising now, given the salience and importance of a number of foreign policy and national security issues, such as terrorism. I dont think we understood how badly until the discovery process in the litigation produced some papers from inside the IG [Inspector General] that had some internal CIA writing on them that was. He headed the Central Intelligence Agency as Director of Central Intelligence from February 5, 1993, until January 10, 1995. They still want an executive summary that they can read. I went back and kind of scratched my head. James Woolsey served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency for two years during the Clinton Administration, and has served in the U.S. government in a number of positions including, Ambassador to the Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, Vienna, Under Secretary of the Navy, General Counsel to the . I would guess today, although I havent been back there in a while, that the trend is still going in the right direction. And I must say that I dont think it is a very efficient use of either of their time for the overall chair, now the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] of the Intelligence Community, to go in and brief the President every morning. You had to manage that situation. Weve been focusing a great deal on external relations with the White House and with the State Department and others. Others had continued. Usually that would be Tony. Im a historian here at the Miller Center. But Perry is a very fine, able man who just calls them straight. What would you guess, Jeff? I believe its the case that we had not had a National Security Council meeting on Somalia, as of Black Hawk down. Whats the blowback? They had begun in 89, 90 and 91. Where is Jim Woolsey now? - chroniclesdengen.com Bob wanted to take a different look. I said, I dont really care where its coming from. Lawyers, guards, defendants' families and the very occasional reporter cram into three short rows of wooden benches. Janet is a very experienced diplomat but even she is struck dumb. Or was most of this being. Ive gathered together the books. https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-fbi-clash-5-questions-with-former-cia-director-jim-woolsey-1517491548. Its a different world than just sort of shifting your focus. We figured if a DOD guy was behind this there would be less resistance to it from our partners. Franks clarified that the FBI has been "in communication" with Woolsey both before and after the matter was taken over by Mueller's office. So youre not going to have just an Okie like me, with even a pretty good language skill, able to do those NOC jobs. It was CIA work that made it clear that it was. George Stephanopoulos recalls: ''We needed conservative Democrats. Here the Agency comes back into play again because when the big military machine packs itself up to go home, the interest doesnt go away, the need for information doesnt go away, and the issue flows back into the hands of the Agency to pick up the pieces and to restructure itself. But I would argue that if you go back to your opening comments about how are we going to help people? Soon after, Nitze hired him for the SALT 1 negotiating team. I can recall a briefing that we did for the First Lady that was essentially using imagery outlining the genocide that was taking place. Currently, Jim Woolsey serves as the director of foreign translation for Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, and he has travelled all over the globe to share the Gospel message. When I came into the job, about two weeks before, there had been issued a new National Intelligence Estimate on Haiti. George indicated he knew this was coming, and he told me that the reason was the Woolsey study that had been done, that this had convinced them that Woolsey was the guy who could make changes in the intel community. This is our show. Perry was very fineas I thought Aspin was. Theyre carefully orchestrated with the State Department. What percentage of this could be attributed to his body clock? ''Jim has always operated at the top level,'' says Bill Butler, a fellow Washington lawyer and Woolsey's close friend and next-door neighbor. sigel pa newspaper. And we worked very hard to pull together the issues that we thought in particular were important for the President and his advisors to know. It could be interpreted many ways. Who's Genie Energy? When Bob is confirmed, he comes over that afternoon and tells Dick Cheney, who of course theoretically owns the NRO through the Department of Defense, that he had made this deal with Boren. Wed take turns chairing the meeting. [50], In April 2021, Woolsey stated in an interview, while promoting his book Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin's Secret War on America, where he claims the Soviet Union ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that he believes aliens were responsible for an anecdote told to him by 'someone he respects. It is still in use today. That requires people who are very brave. I never will forget one particular Senator who is a very able guy and somebody who helped me a good deal. Did you wrestle with this decision for a long time? We worked fine with him. Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com. But that was mainly what we were working on. The station chief calls me right away, because while a CIA officer overseas has a lot of flexibility with respect to whom he can recruit to get information, once somebody says, Will you try to influence policy? Is there anything worth recording for historical purposes? [laughter]. It was just clearly not the purpose of the meeting. So what was really going on here? All those issues were already steaming and causing a fair amount of disruption. It was already in publishing mode. We debated a lot of those issues at that time, from an intellectual standpoint. I said, Well, actually, Ive got a General Counsel, and its not a Presidential appointment. Id done it as an advisor several times, and Id done it in private law practice, and thats kind of what I knew how to do. Yes, maybe you can do mammograms with satellite algorithms. I believe he left like in April or May. Are you dodging press people at the airport at this time? But again on HaitiAristide is not the Thomas Jefferson of Haiti, but that doesnt mean that putting him back in place is still not the policy worth following. And assembled a group of people around Jeff Smith. So North Korea was always looked at, but never with what I would call the blanket treatment. Theres Vice President-elect [Albert] Gore and Tipper [Gore]. Is there a sense of natural antipathy between the Agency and the PFIAB? Then there was a long pause and he said, On those days I just wont take the briefing. Im trying to remember if theres anybody out there that we knew. Right. There were probably 15 people at the dinner party. You could almost see their short list and domestic and economic things they wanted to achieve, and this was simply going to get in the way. In the regular contact you were having with [Milton] Leitenberg, were you, in those sessions, being indirectly tasked by the President? Regardless of whether theyre Republicans or Democrats, when they know the Commander-in-Chief has taken the time to pick up the phone and interact directly with the chairman, theyd better have a really powerful reason why they dont want to do this. I remember thinking, Wow, thats pretty interesting. [30], Within hours of the September 11 attacks, Woolsey appeared on television suggesting Iraqi complicity. Josh Butler. The wall in Woolsey's corner office is selective but impressive: every president from Nixon to Clinton, complete with glowing tributes from each. We notice that the pilots are looking kind of happy and having a good time and laughing, and then we remember that the pilots had been at the table at the dinner drinking the fermented mares milk. Not having that relationship, not having access, and that being perceived as such, lowered your clout, particularly within the community because at the time, the DCI was the coordinator of all the intelligence agencies. Upon the broadcaster's headline-making death, viewers took to social media to express their thoughts and pay tribute to Ramsey's memory. This is going to actually be Clintons budget. It was pretty muchId go over with them pretty much anything, no matter how sensitive. The next morning, I got a call from another staffer and she said, We need for you to have a conflict-of-interest meeting. Despite a brief foray as an activist against the Vietnam War at Yale Law School, Woolsey's first and most important mentor in Washington was Paul Nitze, the legendarily hawkish cold warrior, whom he met when Nitze's daughter was marrying one of Woolsey's Stanford classmates, W. Scott Thompson. I dont think he would have wanted to come in. [29] He has called himself a "Scoop Jackson Democrat" and a "Joe Lieberman Democrat", with "social democratic" domestic views. The White House really wanted, and a number of supporters on the Hill really wanted Aristide to be the Thomas Jefferson of Haiti. .css-16c7pto-SnippetSignInLink{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;cursor:pointer;}Sign In, Copyright 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved, Save up to $15 with TurboTax coupon May 2023, Epic Bundle - 3x Expert Stock Recommendations, 15% OFF DIY Online Tax Filing Services | H&R Block Coupon, 10% TopResume Discount Code for expert resume-writing services, Groupon Deal of the Day - July: Up to 91% Off w/ Groupon Coupon. "[47], In a letter to the editor published in the July 5, 2012, The Wall Street Journal, Woolsey wrote that he supported the release of Jonathan Pollard, citing the passage of time: "When I recommended against clemency, Pollard had been in prison less than a decade. Double Agent, Simon & Schuster, United States Under Secretary of the Navy, Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, the guy who in 1994 crashed his plane onto the White House lawn, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, alleged Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, the blood of a lot of these French young people. The point I want to make here is that the father of this program is Abe Karem and hes a genius. The debriefing of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has revealed a lot more about who was talking to whom, the relationships with Ramzi Yousef, the mass bombing over the Pacific Ocean. Reuters, citing three people familiar with the matter, reported Thursday that Woolsey and his wife, Nancye Miller, pitched a $10 million contract to two Turkish businessmen to help discredit Glen while Woolsey was an adviser to Donald Trump's election campaign. Vicki and her clients would still be counting the government money. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor. Jim Woolsey. This is still in the headlines today. In U.S.-speak, Serbs and Croats were living in ranches and Williamsburg homes respectively, and you could go down the street and see all the equivalents of ranch homes burned out, and the Williamsburg homes werent. Back to Joyces portfolio, the issue was resources. Hussein was an amazing man. Lets see what we can do. This was played up in the press, that Admiral Crowe and the PFIAB was going to sort of return to its old ways. You and I knew each other some. He is also the Chairman of Woolsey Partners LLC. What happened Jim Woolsey? - Kyoto2.org He said, I want to talk to you about this plan you have to testify late this week. I said, Well, it sounds kind of unlikely to me but maybe not impossible. In the meantime, they had to live in Lincoln, Neb. How do you deal with that? This is all supposed to be done a rung away from the Oval Office, from culpability, from accusations against the President himself or even Cabinet officers. When Bob Gates is up for confirmation he agrees with Senator Boren, who is now the chairman of the Senate Select Committee, that as part of his confirmation dealing he will publicly acknowledge the existence of the National Reconnaissance Office. And in your briefings back to the White House youre reporting on your meetings with King Hussein? My station chief was exactly right in coming back and saying, Hey, I cant do this, right? I could have fired one or more of them, or I could have filed a report only dealing with the four guys who had really screwed up. Those, as far as I am concerned, are the two key players. So George was obviously not going to be the staff director of the SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] come January. Is this an economic issue? So Janet and I are conspiring about this, and we get together in some fashion with these other three folksJeff, Joyce, and Rich. By far the National Security Advisor holds all the high cards in this card game, so he made entre to the Deputy Director of NSA, a fellow named Bill Crowell. Bill Studeman signed the waiver that allowed the agencies to meet in the middle and share their information. It wasnt me; it was his whole history. When you see one that is messed up and ugly and people are left behind and it looks chaotic, its usually because the advance planning wasnt nearly as good as it could have been. We came very close once. Sure, but your interpretation of that was that there was something between you and the President that wasnt clicking, not that this was a President for whom intelligence is not. When Jim was announced that afternoon at that news press conference, I watched it at CIA headquarters with George Tenet. Hes about to go on CNN and hed like to talk to Tony Lake. We had discussions about this with the Pentagon. Thats different. He received an honorary doctorate from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC in 2011. It sort of all depends on what you mean by passed. Leaving such a job under these circumstances was a bleak moment. How we were using it was on data sets that were highly classified, typically from satellite and aircraft systems. You still have to tell me when, because I dont know when that is. It seemed like it at the time. Woolsey's newfound cynicism about the government bureaucracy deepened further at the news. Ive had maybe half a beer, a little taste of each of six or seven glasses of wine, and probably a total of one glass of vodka, having just sipped with each toast. Ill come right back to you, Marc. So youve got to go back in and restructure the program, and re-identify opportunities, and try to align yourself with what the demands are. If they have the right people with the right authority, the technology is there to connect the dots. What are we going to do? Well, in terms of damaging the reputation of the CIA and obscuring a lot of the good stuff that was going on, that was immeasurable. Is 'Sound of Freedom' a true story? What to know about the movie, QAnon Arafat keeps standing, jumping up, trying to get to him to kiss him and he cant reach him. President Bush recruited him to negotiate a crucial arms-control agreement with the Soviets. Ex-CIA Director James Woolsey spoke to investigators about a meeting in which Mike Flynn allegedly discussed removing a Turkish cleric from the U.S. Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey testifies before a state legislative committee in Frankfort, Kentucky on Feb. 11, 2013. As I say, I got the impression the White House didnt want to be bothered. The Radicalization of James Woolsey - The New York Times respectful of the institution and full of notions for adapting the agency to a post-cold-war world. To Janets point and following up on Joyces, later in the Clinton administration, the U.S. was betwixt and between as to what our policy should be with intervention in Europe. Now I knew, because Id worked for Mr. Cheney when he was SecDef, that Cheney would at least once a quarter tee an issue up for President George Herbert Walker Bush of such intelligence significance that he would get the President to interact with the chairman of the committee. In other eras, other people would be faced with different problems. I think everybody was there except former President Bush. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8, Continue reading your article witha WSJ subscription, Already a subscriber? Jim died surrounded by family. She was going to go to that ladies prison up there in Connecticut, and do her two-and-a-half years, and head for Colombia. They just werent prepared in their minds to have to deal with this problem. I will tell you that the Justice Department never wants to lose one of these. We had an old abandoned air base in Albania with a trailer on it with just a couple or three people in the trailer. Jim was confirmed and sworn in at the CIA. Terrorism, the Drug War, and America's new role in the Post-Cold War world are also discussed. If I wanted to say something on behalf of the CIA, Id take the cap and put it on his head. The reason you operate unilaterally is the lack of trust. There was a great deal of build-up to this. As long as we kept shoving all this information at them they seemed pretty happy. Introduction : Tara Montpetit is one the singers for Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. He said, Well, I just stuck my head in his office and asked if thats what he wanted and he said, Yes, sure.. Then they said that there was 'no public purpose' for me to have access: I was the defense counsel, and I was supposed to have no 'need to know'?'' Except, Id been there a week or two and I got a call from Bruce Lindsey in the White House. I could never make that happen. Mr. Jim Woolsey, a long-time resident of Twentynine Palms (for 43 years), passed away on Tuesday, March 19, 2019. For the other missions it was summed up in general terms by the dragon-and-snake comment of mine, while keeping an eye on the Russians and the Chinese and so forth. They try to do as much of it at this level, based on policy direction when it comes out of the deputies meeting, or the principals meeting, or some other vehicle. So interaction with the other members of the team was good, but they would also, from time to time, have lunches themselves to go over policy matters, which we werent invited to. He had a folder on me. But there was a point really, particularly for Moynihan and a lot of other people on the Hill, that there should be a peace dividend. So when the Blind Sheikh gets this list of a hundred or so co-conspirators, and one of them is bin Laden, according to Andy anyway, within about three or four days, thats in bin Ladens hands in Sudan, and he takes that as the signal that he ought to get out of town, and leaves for Afghanistan. I asked him what happened to Amber. Im not going to fire the guy on his last day on the job. Bill Perry clearly understood that and created this refuge. As you cross the threshold to action, to Richs NEO operations, you want to have a smooth handoff. Select the Customers tab. [laughter]. He participated in the uncannily correct 2001 Dark Winter bioterrorist exercise. There were people writing op-ed pieces, et cetera. In fact, Jim fought that for the next two years, and in John Deutchs confirmation hearings, he was pressed against the wall and said he would create an agency. Tara Montpetit May 10, 1981. We put together a team of a handful of people. Dr. Kopans said, If we get this technology adopted, we would reduce breast cancer deaths by It was something like over 40 percent. I said, Well, its the annual posture statement that the DCI gives before the Senate Intelligence Committee. So in the middle of all this, Im trying to recruit Tenet to be Smithsonian General Counsel. She said, Jim, this is a strange request, Im sure, coming to your organization.