Warriors, guns, and money

When the Berlin Wall came down, Cold Warriors didn't simply become desk jockeys. Ken Silverstein's new book investigates where they are now -- and what they're doing.

by Jason Vest

KEN SILVERSTEIN tracks the movements of Cold War arms dealers, policy wonks, and spies.

An anti-communist ex-secretary of state who works for his old enemies if the price is right. A liberal senator's warplane-selling wife who gets off firing missiles from the cockpit of an F-16 simulator. The pilot-for-hire who loved the secret world so much that he covered up his Jewish identity to run guns for the Arabs. And the extremely low-profile, amazingly wealthy, utterly charming right-wing German who took part in nearly every major covert operation during the Cold War, and who, in retirement, gives quietly but generously to charity.

The stuff of fiction? Not at all. These are just some of the real-life characters who appear in the pages of Washington-based investigative reporter Ken Silverstein's new book, Private Warriors (Verso, $25, 268 pages). From overseas arms fairs to remote airstrips to the corridors of the Pentagon, Silverstein's narrative is a bizarrely compelling journey to discover where our Cold Warriors have gone.

Some, we learn, are now in the "respectable" end of the arms business. Others ply their trade as spooky "contractors" in the brave new capitalist world, where mercenaries are now mainstream. Most of the policy wonks, meanwhile, can be found racing through the revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense-contractor industry. Some, like Andy Marshall and Frank Gaffney (along with a slew of others who currently advise George W. Bush), continue to beat the drum for "Star Wars" missile defense, appropriations cycle after appropriations cycle.

A contributing editor to Harper's and one of the few bona fide investigative reporters left in Washington, Silverstein spent more than two years filing Freedom of Information Act requests, combing through archives, and knocking on doors from Brazil to Belgium to gather research for Private Warriors. He was getting ready to head out on assignment when we caught up with him in Washington.

Q: You're a familiar byline to regular readers of the Nation, Mother Jones, and Harper's, especially for your work on power in Washington -- particularly lobbying. Why a book on the military-industrial-intelligence complex?

A: In 1997 I was working on a piece about the privatization of foreign military training, in which companies like Military Professional Resources Incorporated [MPRI] -- which is a corporate entity headed by a number of top high-ranking former generals -- train foreign armies in Bosnia, Croatia, Africa, and now, apparently, South America. I was examining that phenomenon, and during one of my interviews with Dan Nielsen, a former congressional staffer and professor at the National Defense University -- a guy I'd describe as a liberal defense intellectual -- he said, "You're on to something far bigger."

With the end of the Cold War, he told me, tens of thousands who ran the Cold War as military officers, spooks, gun runners, Pentagon bureaucrats -- they've all been cast adrift. But they have military and paramilitary skills they developed over the course of the Cold War, and now they're trying to carve out a niche in the private sector. And in the course of their activities, he said, not only do they seek continuation of a hard-line defense posture, but they influence the debate and create a continued momentum for ridiculous levels of defense spending -- $300 billion a year, despite the fact that only North Korea and Cuba are primary enemies. Fortunately for me, Dan was too busy to write the book, and he gave me permission to steal his idea.

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Jason Vest is a Washington-based investigative reporter and a contributing editor for In These Times.