/*"We will never be the Roman empire," Luttwak said, summarizing his
thesis. "Bush, the genius, if he's lucky, will create a situation as in
Byzantium, where the different enemies fight each other." */
http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2008/06/profile-of-edward-operator-luttwak.html
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Profile of Edward "The Operator" Luttwak (CSIS)
<http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2008/06/profile-of-edward-operator-luttwak.html>
" ... Luttwak's career as an international defense consultant, military
strategist and operator, was launched when, in 1968 ... he wrote what
would become his seminal book, Coup d'etat: A Practical Handbook ...
Luttwak first came to my attention by way of an obscure detail in
incorporation papers I had retrieved from a government registrar a few
years ago, that named him as an officer in a small private consulting
company, I.S.I. Enterprises, Inc., headed by Michael Ledeen, the
neoconservative historian and writer who had a key role in the Iran
Contra affair ... "
.......
The Operator: The Double Life of a Military Strategist
www.forward.com
Profile
By Laura Rozen
Jun 05, 2008
A BYZANTINE STRATEGY: In his latest book, Luttwak will argue that, in
crafting its Iraq strategy, America should look to Byzantium.
There's one thing Edward Luttwak wanted me to know, before he asked if I
had a cell phone, and if so, could I turn it off and remove its battery,
presumably if improbably so that he couldn't be traced. We were sitting
in his office library in his family's sprawling Victorian home in
suburban Chevy Chase, Md., full of books from floor to ceiling in Greek,
Latin and from the modern era, volumes by Clausewitz, Walter Lacquer,
Theodore Draper's account of Iran Contra and thousands of others. These
included a recent U.S. Military Balance survey, cataloguing the F-14s,
F-7s, Phantoms and every other significant piece of military anti-air
equipment estimated to be held by Iran --- statistics that Luttwak
looked up and ticked off during the course of our interview.
"I am an operator," Luttwak said.
Indeed he is, one who carries out field operations, extraditions,
arrests, interrogations (never, he insists, using physical violence),
military consulting and counterterrorism training for different agencies
of the U.S., foreign governments and private interests. When we met, in
February, the Drug Enforcement Agency was his latest client; Luttwak
says he went to Colombia to help arrest and deliver a couple of Mexican
drug runners wanted by the DEA.
Luttwak is of course better known as a public intellectual, the author
of some 16 books, as well as a forthcoming study on warfare in
Byzantium, set to be published next year by Harvard University Press.
"We will never be the Roman empire," Luttwak said, summarizing his
thesis. "Bush, the genius, if he's lucky, will create a situation as in
Byzantium, where the different enemies fight each other." In fact, his
two identities have always been intertwined: On a first name basis with
the heads of Italian and other foreign government security agencies,
Luttwak performs such quasi paramilitary operations --- under the vague
title of "consultant" --- while maintaining a public image as a military
historian, thinker and writer, if a frequently (and deliberately)
controversial one.
Why is this 65-year-old intellectual --- on the editorial boards of
Harper's, Britain's Prospect and France's Geopolitique, an emeritus
fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies --- still
in the business of arresting fugitives and interrogating drug dealers, I
asked Luttwak. It was evident he didn't even believe in some of the
missions he was doing (the drug war is futile, he howled, a fraud, and
the heads of the DEA know it's a fraud). Is it a thrill? Luttwak
admitted, that yes, it's thrilling. He enjoys the physical thrill of it all.
Born to a wealthy Jewish family in Arad, in Transylvanian Romania, in
1942 during World War II, Luttwak and his family fled soon after to
Italy, where his father started one of the first Italian plastics
factories. At the age of 9, he was sent off by his family to a Jewish
boarding school in London, where he would later attend the London School
of Economics. Given his background --- part cosmopolitan, part refugee
--- from all over Europe, it's no surprise that Luttwak speaks a half
dozen languages fluently and with evident pleasure (his phone message at
home is in three languages). He still travels frequently to Europe,
South America and Asia for his consulting assignments. In addition to
their Maryland home, Luttwak and his wife, sculptor Dalya Luttwak, also
own an ecologically friendly cattle ranch in Bolivia. (Luttwak, who told
me he conducts his family's Passover Seder in the ancient Aramaic, says
he doesn't consider himself religious, but enjoys the traditions.)
Luttwak's career as an international defense consultant, military
strategist and operator, was launched when, in 1968, as a 26-year-old
graduate of the London School of Economics, he wrote what would become
his seminal book, Coup d'etat: A Practical Handbook, about how countries
and groups can both launch a junta and protect themselves from one, and
which, Luttwak noted proudly, is still in print some 40 years later.
"This short book is...wicked, truthful, and entertaining," the New
Yorker wrote in its review of Coup, which has been printed in 14 languages.
Recruited to Johns Hopkins after advising the French, Israeli and other
governments on military matters, Luttwak earned a PhD in international
relations and started consulting for the U.S. Department of Defense,
military services, the National Security Council, State Department and
nascent U.S. special operations command. Soon he was doing actions for,
among others, the undersecretary of defense for policy in El Salvador.
Luttwak first came to my attention by way of an obscure detail in
incorporation papers I had retrieved from a government registrar a few
years ago, that named him as an officer in a small private consulting
company, I.S.I. Enterprises, Inc., headed by Michael Ledeen, the
neoconservative historian and writer who had a key role in the Iran
Contra affair and who more recently engineered meetings during the Bush
administration between Pentagon officials and controversial arms dealer
Manucher Ghorbanifar.
Luttwak said that he and Ledeen, both fluent Italian speakers who served
as consultants to the Reagan administration, are still friends, but that
he left their joint international consulting business soon after it was
formed, after completing assignments for the security services of Italy
and Spain. (After he left, according to Luttwak, Ledeen went on to do
lobbying and consulting through the business in Africa.) Luttwak said
that he doesn't do the kind of more political covert action that his
friend Ledeen favors.
"Michael is much more of an adventurer in political action than I was,"
Luttwak explained. "I like my adventures in nature."
Luttwak expounds on his insistence on scrupulously upholding the letter
of the law "to the last millimeter" in whatever country in which he is
currently operating, mentioning that he once turned down an Iran-Contra
assignment in Central America when, on a hunch, he checked with
then-House Intelligence Committee minority leader Dick Cheney if the
tasking order was indeed authorized by a presidential finding and
Congress notified of its existence. According to Luttwak, Cheney called
him back after checking and told him no.
Many of these past associations emerged in a recent episode revealed
during my meeting with Luttwak: that he was shown the infamous Niger
forgeries by a friend with the Italian intelligence agency Sismi, when
he was working as a consultant to a Sismi contractor named Luciano Monti
in the 2001-2002 time frame, but that he refused to back-channel them to
the Bush administration. (He never agrees to back-channel intelligence,
Luttwak said, and these looked like forgeries to him.) The allegations
in the forgeries, of course, became one of the Bush White House's most
controversial casus belli for the Iraq war --- and, after proven phony
even on the eve of the invasion, among the most embarrassing and
politically damaging for the president and vice president, who cited the
bogus uranium allegations despite warnings from the CIA not to.
There are a few public glimpses of intriguing episodes of covert
military operations in Luttwak's past. One was recounted in the book
Charlie Wilson's War, by the late Harper's editor and 60 minutes
producer George Criles, recently made into a movie, which described
Luttwak advising Wilson on what non American anti-aircraft weapons the
CIA could covertly supply to the Afghan mujahadeen. According to Criles,
Luttwak recommended the Swiss Oerlikon. Luttwak mentions his presence in
Charlie Wilson's War as being one of the few public descriptions of him
--- at first glance, a somewhat absurd statement, for the author of more
than a dozen published books. But perhaps what Luttwak really means is
that Charlie Wilson's War is one of the few public works that reveal his
non-academic, operational side.
Another revealing Cold War episode in Luttwak's more covert professional
history, recounted by Penn State University criminal justice professor
Alan Block in an academic text, describes Luttwak working as an arms
consultant and CIA go-between for an unusual client: a right-wing
operative, Miami radio talk show host and former beauty queen Barbara
Studley, president of an outfit called GeoMiliTech Consultants
Corporation, whose Cold War-era arms sales involving Iran, South Korea,
Israel and Central America foreshadowed the Iran Contra operation.
According to Block, "GeoMiliTech presented [then CIA director] Bill
Casey its ultimate plan --- a coordinated series of weapons deals worth
$80 million, many of them barter arrangements with Israel, all of them
worked through a secret Swiss bank, the whole package guaranteed to
evade the 'consent or awareness of the Department of State or Congress.'
The program was hand-delivered to Casey by Edward N. Luttwak, now a
distinguished author and Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic &
International Studies in Washington."
When, prompted by the trinkets from the South Korean government circa
1980 and 1981 decorating his book shelf, I asked Luttwak about Studley,
he at first said he did not recall who that is --- using the classic
phrasing a lawyer might prompt a client to use in testimony to evade
answering untruthfully while not really answering. When I asked him if
he knew another of the arms dealers involved in the early Iran arms
sales, Arif Durrani, he said far more definitively, "Absolutely not."
But some 25 years later, covert Iran intrigues and operations were again
on Luttwak's mind when he spoke with me this year. Speaking at a panel
held at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, in February,
Luttwak hinted at post-Revolutionary travels in Iran. "I recommend that
you take a trip to Iran," Luttwak mischievously suggested to audience
members. "Isfahan is beautiful, as is Tabriz in the north, where the
people crave to be Turks," he said, before describing being offered
whiskey --- the good stuff --- by locals he met, a sign of their
defiance to the mullahs.
Luttwak told me he had traveled to Turkey on a prospective assignment a
couple years ago that involved advising Azeri Iranians how they might
agitate for more independence from the Tehran regime. He walked away
from the assignment, he described, when it became evident to him that
the operation was not, as he had originally thought, authorized by the
necessary governments.
But in April, Luttwak told me, he was off to Paris to meet with another
Iranian group seeking his consulting services. "My client is an
anti-Iran group," Luttwak said. "They are serious enough to have come up
with funds to hire consultants." He wouldn't reveal which group it was,
except to say it was authorized to operate in France.
Luttwak has said in numerous interviews and public appearances that he
believes someone should act to destabilize the Iranian regime by arming
and supporting its various disgruntled ethnic minority groups --- the
Kurds, the Goranis ("who are Kurds but don't know it," he told the
Hudson audience), Azeris (who consider themselves Turks, Luttwak said),
Baluch, Khuzestanis --- to rise up against the against the Tehran
regime. Iran is the last multinational country in the region, Luttwak
told the Hudson Institute, and its fate, like other multinational
empires, is to break up.
Iran is also central to Luttwak's thinking about America's own political
landscape and the current presidential race. When we met in February, a
day after Maryland's Democratic primary, Luttwak said that he was
supporting Hillary Clinton because he thought she would be most inclined
to order air strikes on Iran. Contrary to conventional wisdom, as
always, Luttwak said that direct conversations he had had with a certain
leading Republican presidential candidate convinced him that this
person, under the influence of war-weary Pentagon brass, would be
disinclined to order such military action. As for his opinion about
presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, Luttwak took a
preemptive swipe at the candidate's elite American supporters who might
be under the delusion, according to Luttwak, that Obama would improve
America's image in the world, arguing in a May 13 New York Times op-ed
the exact opposite: that the Muslim world would see Obama as a heretic.
The Times's public editor devoted his entire June 1 column to debunking
the allegations Luttwak cited in the piece and criticizing the Times's
editors' decision to run it.
Among the trinkets crowding his library shelves --- awards and mementoes
from the foreign governments he had advised on coups and counter-coups
and terrorism and military strategy --- stands a small black and white
photo of a young Luttwak, in short pants, a white shirt and suspenders,
with his two brothers similarly dressed, the boys from about 6 to 9
years old, his dark-haired mother and father and another man in the
style of the late 1940s Europe. I picked up the photo, melded into a
metal frame, and asked Luttwak about it. The photo was of his family in
Palermo Italy, he said, not at all wistfully, those are his brothers,
one now lives in Israel, the other in Nigeria. The darker man with his
parents: his "father's sidekick," Luttwak said. He looked to be about 8
years old, and World War II was just a few years behind.
Upon my earlier visit, I noticed a gorgeous Ottoman wall hanging in the
foyer, and he told me it was from his family's home in Romania, and how
he'd gone, armed, during the height of the Cold War to the family then
living in his old family's home, and told them there would be no
problems if they allowed him to go retrieve something that belongs to
him, stored under the stairs when his family fled. They let him in, and,
he says, he took it.
Before Luttwak asked me to take the cell phone battery out of my phone
in our February meeting, I offered him another theory about himself,
given his experience as a refugee from the Nazis and the Communists, who
taught himself to be not only smarter than his many enemies but
constantly tested and prepared for military battle, a one-man
intelligence agency and Pentagon, only more single-minded and ruthlessly
efficient when necessary: that he is a Jewish survivalist, albeit one
with a PhD, a dozen published books, as many languages, and a highly
evolved if eccentric sense of personal morality.
He pondered this, and said he doesn't recognize himself in that
description. "I value Jewish culture and traditions, my parents did too,
but I am not a believer." What is there not to believe in, I asked.
Luttwak doesn't believe in a transcendental force, he said, sounding
perhaps a rare note of uncertainty. All these human events, the warfare
and survival he has written so much about, it seems, are left only to man.
Laura Rozen reports from Washington, D.C., as national security
correspondent for Mother Jones. She contributed the afterword to the
memoir of former CIA official Valerie Plame Wilson, "Fair Game: My Life
as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House" (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
http://www.forward.com/articles/13515/