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Muriel Kane

After pulling together the materials for my previous post, I became increasingly convinced that, no matter who actually sent the anthrax letters, both Neil Livingstone and James Woolsey have been deeply implicated in pushing the Iran-anthrax-al Qaeda link and in profiting from the War on Terror. I therefore started checking to see what else I could find to link these two gentlemen to each other, particularly in a context of counter-terrorism profiteering.

I quickly learned that as of last year, Livingstone is no longer with Global Options but has a new firm called ExecutiveAction LLC, in which Woolsey is also involved.

October 25 2007ExecutiveAction, LLC today announced that R. James Woolsey has been named Chairman of the company’s Senior Advisory Board.

“Jim Woolsey is uniquely qualified to head our Advisory Board in view of his vast international experience and his comprehensive knowledge of the U.S. Government,” said Neil C. Livingstone, Chairman and CEO of ExecutiveAction. “On top of that, he’s a great American.”

The Senior Advisory Board provides unique perspectives and insights to the management of the company and, on occasion, its clients.

I then found a little more on Livingstone and ExecutiveAction in a post by Laura Rozen at Mother Jones:

11/13/07My inbox this morning had a few of these press releases forwarded to me:

ExecutiveAction today announced it will hold a press conference on Wednesday, November 14, at 10:30 a.m. at the National Press Club to release the threat assessment – Spores: The Threat of a Catastrophic Anthrax Attack on America. At the press conference will be:Neil Livingstone - CEO of ExecutiveAction and one of the nation’s top terrorism experts. R. James Woolsey –Former Director of the CIA and Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton. Professor Yonah Alexander - Senior Fellow at the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University and author of more than 90 books on terrorism and international affairs. David Wright - CEO of PharmAthene, a biodefense company headquartered in Annapolis.

The arresting name of the company holding the press conference, Executive Action — code for assassination — is fully intended. “Think of us as a McKinsey & Company with muscle, a private CIA and Defense Department available to address your most intractable problems and difficult challenges,” declared its CEO and founder Neil Livingstone when the group opened its doors in the Watergate last summer.

That was certainly intriguing — not least because Executive Action is also the name of a 1973 movie in which “rogue intelligence agents, right-wing politicians, greedy capitalists, and free-lance assassins plot and carry out the JFK assassination.”

However, I found what turned out to be an even more striking connection to Livingstone and Woolsey on the webpage of an “incident response management systems” firm formerly known as SuperCom and now as Vuance, whose advisory board consists in its entirety of R. James Woolsey, Oliver “Buck” Revell, and Neil C. Livingstone.

I knew I had run into Oliver “Buck” Revell’s name before — you don’t tend to forget a name like that — so I checked my files and found that he was an associate deputy director of the FBI in the 1980’s who has been accused of having participated in covering up both Iran-Contra and Iraqgate, as well as of planning with Oliver North to harass anti-Contra activists in the US.

I additionally found Revell mentioned in an extremely interesting CounterPunch article from November 2001, “Homeland Insecurity” by Douglas Valentine:

November 8, 2001The CIA’s counter-terror network, as established by William Casey, was a direct descendant of the counter-intelligence special operations unit, CHAOS, formed by James Angleton in August 1967, specifically to spy on the New Left and other radical political groups in the anti-war and civil rights movements. …

In 1981, Reagan’s Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, saw the political possibilities of turning Buckley’s Office of Domestic Terrorism into a “back-channel” mechanism, like Chaos under Angleton and Ober, for conducting secret “hip pocket” operations outside the normal chain of command. And thus was born the Counter-Terror Network that exists until today, as the official manifestation of the off-the-shelf Enterprise formed by Bush and Shackley back in 1976. …

The ultimate object of Reagan Administration policy was the destruction of the Soviet Union through the application of “low-intensity warfare” in Afghanistan; counter-terror in the Middle East, and pro-active terror in Latin America. Effecting this policy involved a number of illegal covert actions, and so Casey had to run his Counter-Terror Network outside of the CIA itself, through a cabal of secret agents throughout the government. …

Starting in February 1983, North, according to [Peter Dale] Scott, developed a secret Crisis Management Center, and REX 84, “a plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.” … On 20 January 1986, North’s efforts were crowned with National Security Decision Directive 207, making him chief coordinator of the Administration’s counter-terror program, and providing him with a secret office and staff known as the Office To Combat Terrorism. Working through the inter-agency Operations Sub-Group (OSG), North coordinated the secret Counter-Terror Network and Secord’s Enterprise in a series of mind-boggling illegal operations.

That secret Counter-Terror Network sounds very much like the unnamed operation that I referred to in my previous post, the one described by Joseph Trento in which Neil Livingstone and Robert Owen were involved as supposedly private PR contractors. Trento wrote in Prelude to Terror, “Through the 1980s, the number of people ‘carrying the administration’s water’ grew, and the scope of their efforts reached around the world. With that expansion, Casey and [George H.W.] Bush became even more reliant on [former CIA agent Theodore] Shackley and his friends, especially for two adventures that became known as Iran-Contra and Iraqgate. … Livingstone put together a dubious cast of characters to carry out the missions under his authority. Among others, he hired Rob Owen, who had absolutely no qualifications in public relations. Owen would later emerge as a key figure in Iran-Contra.”

Valentine names seven ranking members of Ollie North’s Counter-Terror Network, including not only Revell — in his role as FBI Counter-Terror Chief — but also Richard Armitage at the Defense Department and Michael Ledeen at the National Security Council. The core group was rounded off when Casey added CIA officer Duane Clarridge to the team in 1986.

These last three names — Armitage, Ledeen, and Clarridge — are particularly interesting. Not only were they all deeply involved in Iran-Contra plotting in the 80’s, but all three have recently been linked in various ways to the Niger uranium forgeries. We should bear in mind that those forgeries were employed in 2002-03 to provide exactly the sort of evidence of an Iraqi connection with WMD’s that administration warhawks had hoped in the fall of 2001 to get from the anthrax attacks but which never quite materialized.

Ledeen in particular is often accused of having had a hand in the forgeries because he was close to the Italian officials who, in October 2001, began pushing the story that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger. That story didn’t initially gain much attention in Washington — perhaps because trying to establish an anthrax connection still appeared to be a more promising approach — but by December, Ledeen had arranged a meeting with those same officials in Rome. It is widely suspected that the creation of the forgeries was planned by Ledeen and others at this meeting, although the actual forged documents did not surface until several months later.

Ledeen has repeatedly denied having been the creator of the Niger forgeries — even writing one column in which he put into the mouth of the ghost of James Jesus Angleton a suggestion that “I didn’t know your French was good enough.” That part may even be true — but according to various sources, a 2005 Italian parliamentary report named Ledeen as the conduit for the report while identifying Ledeen’s associate Duane Clarridge, who had formerly been CIA station chief at Rome, as one of the two actual forgers.

Armitage, who served in the Bush administration from 2001 to 2005 as a deputy secretary of state, is not often though of as associated with Ledeen. However, he comes into the Niger story at two crucial points, first as one of a small number of officials who were informed in advance about that December 2001 meeting. More recently, Armitage has confessed to having been the person who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to columnist Robert Novak during an unguarded moment of loose-lipped gossip — a confession that many observers feel raises more questions than it answers.

It has seemed for some time there could be a kind of informal Iran-Contra old boys’ network connected with some of the more covert dealings of the current Bush administration. If that is so, then the veterans of Ollie North’s Counter-Terror Network — rather than the Iran-Contra operation as a whole — may be at the heart of it.