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Fred Fleitz is a career intelligence officer who served as chief of staff to John Bolton in the State Department and as a Republican staffer on the House Intelligence Committee during the George W. Bush administration.1 Fleitz was linked to a number of controversies that wracked the administration, including the  “Plamegate” affair (in which a CIA operative’s name was released and a coverup ensued) and efforts by partisans in government to silence opponents. Though low-profile, he is perhaps best known as the author of a controversial 2006 report on the nuclear threat from Iran that was harshly criticized by the International Atomic Energy Agency for containing “erroneous, misleading, and unsubstantiated information.”2

April 2005 hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Bolton's nomination to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations opened a small window into Fleitz’s career. Fleitz testified, "I'm a CI [counterintelligence] officer on detail to John Bolton's staff as a special assistant, I've been on detail since August 2001. I've been a CI officer for 19 years, and I came the, a CI WINPAC [sic], the Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center. I've done some work in WMD, most of my work has been on international organizations."3 When a committee counselor asked why he had been sent from the CIA to the State Department, Fleitz replied, "In early 2000, 2001, Mr. Bolton asked that I be detailed, since he had worked with me during the first Bush administration; I also handled UN issues when he was the assistant secretary of state for international organizations, and he had asked that I be sent to him."4

Describing his job responsibilities, Fleitz said, "I'm the acting Chief of Staff for the T front office [the Under Secretary's Office, which oversees four assistant secretaries], and I also have responsibilities with WINPAC, and I perform liaison function for the Agency and Mr. Bolton.”5

Valerie Plame—the CIA operative whose cover was blown in 2003—had also worked at WINPAC, leading some, including foreign policy blogger Laura Rozen, to suspect Fleitz could have been involved with the leak.6 (The leak sparked a federal investigation resulting in the prosecution of former Bush administration official I. Lewis Libby; former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage admitted in September 2006 to exposing Plame’s name.)

Fleitz was also tied to Bolton’s efforts to silence critics in the administration regarding the direction of U.S. foreign policy. During Bolton's spring 2005 nomination hearing, Alan Foley, who headed CIA's weapons intelligence office, testified that in 2002 Fleitz told him about Bolton's disappointment with an analyst who contested Bolton's contention that Cuba was vigorously trying to develop weapons of mass destruction. Foley told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "What I remember is Fred said something in the conversation, like, 'John thinks this guy ought to be fired.' And I remember being jarred by that.”7 Though Fleitz and Bolton clashed with their colleagues, they were defended by Gary Schmitt of the Project for the New American Century in April 2005.8

Fleitz was also reportedly involved in efforts to sideline the work of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which was one of the few intel outfits that seriously questioned the justifications used by the Bush administration for advocating war in Iraq (for more on the INR, see Right Web Profile: Randall Fort). Citing declassified e-mails, Reuters reported that Fleitz "threatened to diminish the role of the State Department's intelligence bureau because of a dispute over analyzing China's missile export controls.”9

Some observers argued that all the attention Fleitz received from blogs was missing the point. Steve Clemons opined in his Washington Note blog, "Fred Fleitz, an interesting and provocative CIA official who was loaned to Bolton, was not operating in his own right. Fleitz was not [a] renegade himself. He was following instructions of Bolton, operating on behalf of Bolton, in a manner consistent with the expectations—and apparently the behavior paradigm—of John Bolton.”10

After Bolton left the State Department, Fleitz became a staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, where he served as the principal author of the August 2006 committee report, "Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States," which criticized the intelligence community for not providing more evidence of the threatening nature of Iran's nuclear program.11 Commenting on the controversial report, journalist Jim Lobe wrote, "The fact that Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA officer, was apparently the report's main author suggests that his effort to undermine confidence in the intelligence community's estimates regarding Iran is part of a larger campaign that includes many of the same hawks who led the drive to war in Iraq. In addition to working for [Rep. Peter] Hoekstra, a staunch administration loyalist, Fleitz served as John Bolton's special assistant during Bush's first term. Bolton, then undersecretary of state for international security and arms control, worked particularly closely with neoconservatives in [Dick] Cheney's office and the Pentagon to undermine efforts by his nominal boss at the time, Secretary of State Colin Powell, to engage Iran, North Korea, and Syria on a range of issues.”12

Fleitz is the author of the 2002 book Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s: Causes, Solutions, and U.S. Interests. Blurbed by Jeane Kirkpatrick on its jacket as a "splendid analysis of peacekeeping in the 90s [that] illuminates the problems encountered by the United States in its effort to utilize the new tool to achieve military goals," the book argues that peacekeeping operations can only work in a limited number of situations. Citing a number of peacekeeping "fiascoes" during the last decade, including in Somalia and Sierra Leone, Fleitz argues that UN peacekeeping missions should be limited to only one type of peacekeeping operation: "traditional" peacekeeping, which he defines as "unarmed or lightly armed multilateral troops deployed with the consent of state-party disputants. They are impartial and use force only in self-defense. Traditional peacekeeping forces sometimes are permissible to help end civil wars if verifiable cease-fires and the full consent of disputants can be obtained."13

According to his biography on the book's jacket, Fleitz is the former president of the board of directors of the National Collegiate Conference Association, a nongovernmental organization that oversees the National Model United Nations program.

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.