Early life

Woolsey was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of Clyde (Kirby) and Robert James Woolsey, Sr. He graduated from Tulsa's Tulsa Central High School. In 1963, he received his BA from Stanford University (Phi Beta Kappa), and in 1965 his MA from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and an LLB from Yale Law School in 1968.

Woolsey was founder and president of Yale Citizens for Eugene McCarthy for President from 1967 to 1968. He was prominently active in the anti-Vietnam War movement.

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 (1973-77) and partner (1979-89, 1991-93).

Woolsey has served in the U.S. government as:

• Advisor (during military service) on the U.S. Delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT 1), Helsinki and Vienna, 1969-1970
• General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, 1970-73
• Under Secretary of the Navy, 1977-1979
• Delegate at Large to the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and Nuclear and Space Arms Talks (NST), Geneva, 1983-1986
• Ambassador to the Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), Vienna, 1989-1991
• Director of CIA, 1993-1995

CIA Director

Relationship with Bill Clinton

As Director of the CIA, Woolsey was notable for having 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 be tougher on Taiwan, Bosnia, and human rights 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 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 was forced to resign.

Later career

Woolsey is the chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is Chairman of the Advisory Board at the Opportunities Development Group (ODG). ODG did not file a federal tax return in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012. He is currently a member of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) 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 (since July 15, 2002). 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 is a Member of the Board of Advisors of the Global Panel Foundation 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 (PNAC) 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.

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 has been a Board Member and Vice-Chairman of The Jamestown Foundation, and sits on the advisory board for nonprofit America Abroad Media.

He currently serves as Chancellor at The Institute of World Politics and the independent non-executive director of Imperial Pacific.

Views

Woolsey has been known primarily as a neoconservative Democrat—hawkish on foreign policy issues but liberal on economic and social issues. 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

Main article: U.S. Energy Independence

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? (2006), 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 Director's 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.

Iraq

Within hours of the September 11 attacks, Woolsey appeared on television suggesting Iraqi complicity. In September 2002, as Congress was deliberating authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq, Woolsey told the Wall Street Journal that he believed that Iraq was also connected to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.

In 2005, Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation think tank, accused Woolsey of both profiting from and promoting the Iraq War. Melvin A. Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and former CIA division chief, told the Washington Post that "Woolsey was a disaster as CIA director in the 1990s and is now running around this country calling for a World War IV to deal with the Islamic problem".

During a January 14, 2009 interview by Peter Robinson on Uncommon Knowledge, Woolsey described the CIA's intelligence about alleged Iraqi chemical and biological weapons as a "failure" before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He criticized the Bush administration for lumping together many different materials with different capabilities under the broad category of weapons of mass destruction. He also stated that the Iraqis engaged in "red on red deception" in which Generals were led to falsely believe that their rival Generals had weapons, and he described the American intelligence failure as a reasonable mistake rather than an act of incompetence.

Along with six other former directors, Woolsey was one of the signatories to the September 18, 2009 letter sent to President Obama urging him to exercise authority to reverse Attorney General Eric Holder’s August 24 decision to reopen the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations.

Other

In 2010, Woolsey supported the Oklahoma ban on Sharia law, recording a message aired for thousands of Oklahomans. Woolsey, along with co-authors such as former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin and neoconservative activist Frank Gaffney, released a book entitled Shariah: The Threat to America, published by the Center for Security Policy. The book "describes what its authors call a 'stealth jihad' that must be thwarted before it's too late", and argues: "Most mosques in the United States already have been radicalized, that most Muslim social organizations are fronts for violent jihadists and that Muslims who practice sharia law seek to impose it in this country". According to the Washington Post, "Government terrorism experts call the views expressed in the center's book inaccurate and counterproductive".

Woolsey was supportive of former CIA Director Leon Panetta, whom he has compared to Kennedy-era CIA head John McCone.

Woolsey believes that Edward Snowden's disclosure of classified intelligence methods has done grave damage to the security of western nations. During an interview with Fox News on December 17, 2013, discussing the idea of granting Snowden amnesty, Woolsey stated, "I think giving him amnesty is idiotic. … He should be prosecuted for treason. If convicted by a jury of his peers, he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead". In a CNN interview, Woolsey said "the blood of a lot of these French young people is on hands."

In a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, published on July 5, 2012, Woolsey wrote that he now supports release of Jonathan Pollard, citing the passage of time: "When I recommended against clemency, Pollard had been in prison less than a decade. Today he has been incarcerated for over a quarter of a century under his life sentence." He pointed out that of the more than 50 recently convicted Soviet and Chinese spies, only two received life sentences, and two-thirds were sentenced to less time than Pollard has served so far. He further stated that "Pollard has cooperated fully with the U.S. government, pledged not to profit from his crime (e.g., from book sales), and has many times expressed remorse for what he did." Woolsey expressed his belief that Pollard is still imprisoned only because he is Jewish. He said, "anti-Semitism played a role in the continued detention of Pollard." "For those hung up for some reason on the fact that he's an American Jew, pretend he's a Greek- or Korean- or Filipino-American and free him," Woolsey, who is not Jewish, said in his letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Woolsey was interviewed in Boris Malagurski's documentary film The Weight of Chains 2 (2014), in which he said that the "United States and the CIA made mistakes and make mistakes all the time".

Personal life

Woolsey is divorced from his first wife Suzanne and has remarried. He has three grandchildren with his first wife. He lives near Annapolis, Maryland.

Woolsey is an advisor at the Gatestone Institute.

Woolsey is a descendant of George (Joris) Woolsey, one of the earliest settlers of New Amsterdam, and Thomas Cornell.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]