Short form: Richard Perle, once known without affection as the Prince of Darkness, now the leading warhard/Likudnik ideologue, is the chairman of a Venture Capital trust which invests in the arms trade, sorry “defence equipment, and products useful in Homeland Security”. He is also a hugely influential government adviser, with access to classified information, and thus explicitly prohibited under the relevant, formalised, code of ethics, from having a financial interest in business affected by defence policy. Since his title is “Chairman of the Defence Policy Board” this shouldn’t be too complicated for such an intelligent man to understand.
This story was dug out by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Perle’s reaction, when questioned about this on television, was to call Hersh “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist.”
There are two further details to the story: the first is something that Perle has already got away with:
“In 1983, he was the subject of a New York Times investigation into an allegation that he recommended that the Army buy weapons from an Israeli company from whose owners he had, two years earlier, accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar fee. Perle later acknowledged that he had accepted the fee, but vigorously denied any wrongdoing. He had not recused himself in the matter, he explained, because the fee was for work he had done before he took the Defense Department job. He added, ‘The ultimate issue, of course, was a question of procurement, and I am not a procurement officer.’ He was never officially accused of any ethical violations in the matter.”
The second is that the whole story came to light because Perle was soliciting Saudi investment in his new firm: this is Perle, the man who wants the Middle East made safe for democracy; and also, last summer August, the sponsor of the ex-LaRouchie who gave a Pentagon briefing in front of Donald Rumsfeld urging that the USA invade Saudi when it is finished with Iraq.