Among the neoconservative group, Perle provides the best illustration of operating in multiple roles. He chose not to take a full-fledged position in the Bush administration to chair the Defense Policy Board. A Pentagon advisory body with a mixed state-private character, the board gives its members access to classified information. Until he relinquished his position on the board, Perle's standing as a not quite, but sort of, government official yielded him simultaneously the credibility of an administration insider and the leeway of a private person. He could use his position as a platform from which to counter the neoconservative-skeptical State Department and as a source of access to defense and intelligence information that would appeal to business clients. Or, if his purposes were better served, he could frame his activities under the guise of his other identities, such as a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute -- which, to an uninformed audience, gave him the appearance of a disinterested public intellectual.

The key point here is this: The ambiguity that swirls around flex players is not just a byproduct of their activities; their influence is greatly enhanced by it. Of course Perle declined an actual job in the administration -- the Defense Policy Board position afforded him much more flexibility and hence potential influence than he would have had as a mere government official.

Third, flex groups create not-quite-state, not-quite-private organizations (with often quite vague publicly stated goals) and duplicative divisions and bodies of government to bypass or override the input of otherwise relevant officials and parties. The Harvard-Chubais players set up and ran a series of such organizations, ostensibly to carry out economic reform. For example, the Russian Privatization Center, the donors' flagship organization, was a nongovernmental organization established by Yeltsin's presidential decree and Harvard University. As a nongovernmental organization, it received tens of millions of dollars from Western foundations, which like to support NGOs. As a government organization, it received hundreds of millions of dollars from international financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which typically lend to states. The center negotiated with and received loans on behalf of the Russian government, making the Russian public responsible for paying back the loans. The center's equivocal status equipped it to circumvent the state privatization agency and exert more influence over many privatization decisions than that body did. The center's "private" standing as an NGO enabled it to distance itself from government decisions that proved unpopular. It had the best of all possible worlds.

The neoconservative group operates in similar fashion. It set up alternative hubs of decision making, including its own intelligence offices in the Pentagon, to influence policy decisions. The distrust of existing governmental bodies led the group to establish its own duplicative structures of government. Two special units in the Pentagon, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans, were created under Feith. These units sometimes served to bypass or override the input of otherwise relevant entities and processes. According to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's July 7 "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq" (in a section containing the "additional views" of Sens. John Rockefeller, Carl Levin and Richard Durbin), "when the analytical judgments of the intelligence community did not conform to the more conclusive and dire administration views of Iraqi links to al-Qaeda ... policymakers within the Pentagon denigrated the intelligence community's analysis and sought to trump it by circumventing the CIA and briefing their own analysis directly to the White House." The Senate report also notes that in a communication sent to Wolfowitz and Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld regarding a CIA report that failed to establish a convincing connection between Iraq and al-Qaida, Feith's people recommended that the "CIA's interpretation ought to be ignored." Rockefeller, vice chairman of the intelligence committee, said in a news conference that Feith's "private intelligence" operation was "not lawful."

Recent Stories