James Woolsey


Robert James Woolsey Jr. is an American lawyer who has served in various senior positions. He headed the Central Intelligence Agency as Director of Central Intelligence from February 5, 1993 until January 10, 1995. He held a variety of government positions in the 1970s and 1980s, including as United States Under Secretary of the Navy from 1977 to 1979, and was involved in treaty negotiations with the Soviet Union for five years in the 1980s. His career also included time as a professional lawyer, venture capitalist and investor in the private sector.

Early life and education

Woolsey was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of Clyde and Robert James Woolsey Sr. He graduated from Tulsa's Tulsa Central High School. In 1963, he received his Bachelor of Arts from Stanford University with high honors and membership in Phi Beta Kappa, then was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study in England at the University of Oxford, where he studied for and earned a second Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating 1965. In 1968, he received his Bachelor of Laws from Yale Law School.

Career

Woolsey has held important positions in both Democratic and Republican administrations. His influence has been felt during the administrations of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. He has also worked at the Shea & Gardner law firm, as Associate and partner.
Woolsey has served in the U.S. government as:

Relationship with Bill Clinton

As Director of the CIA, Woolsey had limited access to President Bill Clinton. According to journalist Richard Miniter:
Never once in his two-year tenure did CIA director James Woolsey ever have a one-on-one meeting with Clinton. Even semi-private meetings were rare. They only happened twice. Woolsey told me: "It wasn't that I had a bad relationship with the president. It just didn't exist."

Another quote about his relationship with Clinton, according to Paula Kaufman of Insight on the News:
Remember the guy who in 1994 crashed his plane onto the White House lawn? That was me trying to get an appointment to see President Clinton.

David Halberstam notes in War in a Time of Peace that Clinton chose Woolsey for CIA director because the Clinton campaign had courted neoconservatives leading up to the 1992 election, promising to assist democratic Taiwan, Bosnia in Bosnian War, and be tougher on human rights violations in China, and it was decided that they ought to give at least one neoconservative a job in the administration.

Aldrich Ames

Woolsey was CIA director when Aldrich Ames was arrested, on February 21, 1994, for treason and spying against the United States. The CIA was criticized for not focusing on Ames sooner, given the obvious increase in Ames' standard of living; and there was a "huge uproar" in Congress when Woolsey decided that no one in the CIA would be dismissed or demoted at the agency. Woolsey declared: "Some have clamored for heads to roll in order that we could say that heads have rolled... Sorry, that's not my way." Woolsey abruptly resigned on December 28, 1994.

Later career

Woolsey joined the board of directors for The Arlington Institute in 1992.
He is currently a member of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy Board of Advisors, Advisor of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, co-founder of the United States Energy Security Council, Founding Member of the Set America Free Coalition, and a senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton for Global Strategic Security.
He is a Patron of the Henry Jackson Society, a British think tank. Woolsey has had long-standing contact with Central and Eastern Europe and as a Member of the Board of Advisors for America of the based in Berlin, Copenhagen, Prague, Sydney, and Toronto. He was formerly chairman of the Freedom House board of trustees. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor.
Woolsey is a member of the Project for the New American Century and was one of the signatories to the January 26, 1998, letter sent to President Clinton that called for the removal of Saddam Hussein. That same year he served on the Rumsfeld Commission, which investigated the threat of ballistic missiles for the U.S. Congress.
Woolsey previously served as chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit, nonpartisan D.C.-based research institute that focuses on foreign policy and national security.
In 2008, Woolsey joined VantagePoint Venture Partners as a venture partner.
John McCain hired Woolsey as an advisor on energy and climate change issues for his 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign.
In April 2011, Lux Capital announced that Woolsey would become a venture partner in the firm.
In July 2011, Woolsey, in cooperation with Robert McFarlane, co-founded the United States Energy Security Council. Woolsey currently sits on the board of advisors for the Fuel Freedom Foundation.
He received an honorary doctorate from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC in 2011.
Woolsey was a board member and vice-chairman of The Jamestown Foundation, and sits on the advisory board for nonprofit America Abroad Media.
Woolsey currently sits on the Strategic Advisory Board for Genie Energy with Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, and Lord Jacob Rothschild. Genie is known for discovering a "massive" oil strata in Syria's Golan Heights near Israel.
He formerly served as Chancellor at The Institute of World Politics and the independent non-executive director of Imperial Pacific.
Woolsey joined as a senior adviser to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in September 2016. He resigned on January 5 amid Congressional hearings into cyber attacks and public statements by Donald Trump critical of the United States Intelligence Community.
On October 27, 2017, Woolsey's spokesman told NBC News that Woolsey has cooperated with the investigations of the FBI and that of Special Counsel Robert Mueller into a meeting that then-Donald Trump campaign advisor Michael Flynn held in September 2016. Woolsey alleges that, during the meeting, Flynn offered to help officials of Turkish government return Turkish dissident Fethullah Gülen to Turkey.
In April 2021, Woolsey was officially banned from entering Russia with the counter sanction set by the Russian government in response to sanctions under the Biden administration. He also accused the Soviet Union of being responsible for the Assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in a book published in 2021. According to James Woolsey and Ion Mihai Pacepa in their 2021 book Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin's Secret War on America, both Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina Oswald Porter are Soviet agents.
On July 15, 2023, the Washington Post published an article the Justice Department unsealed its indictment of Gal Luft, a dual Israeli and American citizen who ran a Maryland think tank. The indictment describes what it casts as an effort by Luft and a Chinese oil company representative to “recruit” a “former senior U.S. government official” and get him installed in a position of power in Trump’s orbit, even before his election. The Chinese business executive and the former senior U.S. government official aren’t named in the indictment, but the context indicates they are Patrick Ho and former CIA director James Woolsey, respectively.

Views

Woolsey has been known primarily as a neoconservative Democrat—hawkish on foreign policy issues but liberal on economic and social issues. In 2008 he endorsed Senator John McCain for president and served as one of McCain's foreign policy advisors. He has called himself a "Scoop Jackson Democrat" and a "Joe Lieberman Democrat", with "social democratic" domestic views. He regards the label "neoconservative" as a "silly term".

Energy

Woolsey was a keynote speaker at the EELPJ symposium on wind energy and biofuels in Houston, Texas on February 23, 2007, during which he outlined the national security arguments in favor of moving away from fossil fuels. In a July 2007 interview with The Futurist magazine he argued that U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil ranks "very high" as a national security concern.
Woolsey is featured in Thomas Friedman's Discovery Channel documentary Addicted to Oil, and in the documentary film Who Killed the Electric Car?, addressing solutions to oil dependency through the development of the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle and use of biomass fuels such as cellulosic ethanol. He is a founding member of the Set America Free Coalition, dedicated to freeing the United States from oil dependence. He is on the board of directors for the electric vehicle advocacy group Plug In America and is an advisor to The Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a think tank focused on energy security.
Woolsey serves on the board of directors for Silicon Valley solar energy start-up Siva Power, which claims it can manufacture the lowest-cost solar panels in the world.
Woolsey wrote the foreword to 50 Simple Steps to Save the Earth from Global Warming.
Woolsey is known for clearly articulating the national security argument in support of moving away from fossil fuels and towards distributed generation. He has advocated for measures to fight global warming.

Foreign influence in elections

Woolsey has spoken publicly about the issue of election interference, particularly with respect to foreign involvement in American democratic processes. In a 2018 interview with Fox News, Woolsey discussed the historical context of election interference, admitting that the United States has interfered in elections in foreign countries. He remarked that such actions were undertaken “in order to avoid the communists from taking over, for example in Europe in ‘47, ‘48, ‘49, the Greeks and the Italians,” referencing the 1948 Italian general election.
Woolsey has also raised concerns about the increasing sophistication of election interference techniques, particularly with the advent of cyber warfare. He has advocated for enhanced cybersecurity measures to safeguard electoral integrity, emphasizing the importance of protecting democratic institutions from foreign influence.