Drawing on my experience as a social anthropologist who has studied informal systems and networks over several decades, I call the members of such groups "flex players." "Flex groups" describe the informal units in which flex players gain influence by quietly boosting one another, promoting one another for influential positions and coordinating their efforts inside and outside government to achieve mutual goals -- which are always in their own interest but not necessarily the public's. Flex groups have several other distinguishing characteristics.

First, the togetherness of flex groups and the players' propensity to work concertedly to achieve their goals -- even to the point of skirting regulations that might keep them from doing so -- while still appearing to uphold the letter of the law lie at the heart of their effectiveness. The neoconservative group provides a running example that spans several decades. Consider the relationships among three members of the neoconservative core: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. In 1978, while working as an aide to Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Richard Perle was caught in a breach of national security by then CIA Director Stansfield Turner, who urged that Jackson fire him. Perle received a reprimand but was kept on staff, according to a report in the Washington Post by Sidney Blumenthal (Nov. 23, 1987). In another instance, according to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, Perle was questioned by the FBI after a wiretap picked him up discussing classified information (which he said he obtained from a National Security Council staff member) with an Israeli Embassy official.

In 1973, Perle helped his friend Wolfowitz find employment in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In 1982, Perle, as assistant secretary for international security policy in President Reagan's Defense Department, hired and later promoted Feith after he had been fired from his post as a Middle East analyst at the NSC.

A couple of years after leaving the Pentagon, Perle became a highly paid consultant for the lobbying firm International Advisers Inc., which was established by Feith in 1989. The firm served as a way for Perle -- who had just finished a seven-year stint at the Pentagon, during which he supervised U.S. military assistance to Turkey -- to get around federal regulations prohibiting officials from serving foreign interests right after leaving government office.

The mutual assistance of these three central figures continues to this day. In 2001, Perle and Wolfowitz (as deputy secretary of defense) saw to it that Feith was appointed undersecretary for policy in the Defense Department. Feith, in turn, selected Perle for appointment as chairman of the Defense Policy Board. (Perle resigned as chairman in March 2003 amid allegations of conflict of interest and from the board altogether a year later.)

Second, pivotal flex players often adopt overlapping roles -- shifting, blurred and sometimes conflicting -- that avoid the constraints and accountability that normally govern both government and business institutions. In the Harvard case, the virtual blank check given to the consultants enabled them to wear all manner of government, political, business and university hats to best serve their own objectives, but not necessarily those of their country. Their overlapping roles went beyond their investments in Russian securities, equities, oil and aluminum companies, real estate and mutual funds named in the government lawsuit to encompass representational juggling. Although he was ostensibly a representative of American aid, Hay was able to approve some privatization decisions of the Russian state on authority given to him by the Russian members of the Harvard-Russia coterie, many of whom also doubled as officials in the Russian government. These officials consisted of Anatoly Chubais, a ubiquitous aide to President Boris Yeltsin and his group of "reformers."

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