November 23, 2015

The Spooky and Scandalous Past of Ben Carson's Top National Security Adviser

Duane Clarridge was caught up in not one but several CIA scandals.

By David Corn
Wed Nov. 18, 2015 2:02 PM EST

On Tuesday, the New York Times published a story that had the politerati abuzz. The headline was bold: "Ben Carson Is Struggling to Grasp Foreign Policy, Advisers Say." The piece reported that the GOP presidential candidate's "remarks on foreign policy have repeatedly raised questions about his grasp of the subject," and it noted that "two of his top advisers said in interviews that he had struggled to master the intricacies of the Middle East and national security and that intense tutoring was having little effect." Duane Clarridge, a top adviser to Carson on terrorism and national security, told the Times, "Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East." Ouch.

The Carson campaign immediately blamed the messengers. Carson's spokesman called the article "an affront to good journalistic practices" and claimed that the Times had taken "advantage of an elderly gentleman." Clarridge—known to his pals as Dewey—is 82 years old. But the damage was done. Clarridge's observations reinforced the impression that Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, is in over his head when it comes to national security issues.

A particularly intriguing aspect of this dustup was that Carson had turned to Clarridge for foreign policy advice. Often portrayed as a veteran spymaster in the media, Clarridge has indeed had a long career in intelligence, but it has been a checkered one.

Clarridge first achieved public notoriety during the Iran-contra affair—the doozy of a scandal in which President Ronald Reagan secretly sold arms to the terrorist-supporting regime of Iran in order to free American hostages and in which his national security crew used these ill-gotten proceeds to secretly finance the CIA-backed contras who were trying to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua. Clarridge, then a top CIA official, played a role in both sides of the conspiracy. He helped White House aide Oliver North use a CIA front company to ship US-made HAWK missiles to Iran. According to the independent counsel who investigated the scandal, he also sought funding from the apartheid regime of South Africa for the contras, after Congress had cut off assistance for the contras. Clarridge retired from the CIA in 1987 after being formally reprimanded for his involvement in the Iran weapons deal.

But there was worse blowback to come. In 1991, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh charged Clarridge for lying to congressional investigators and a presidential commission about his role in the trading-arms-for-hostages skullduggery. Essentially, after news of the clandestine deal with Tehran broke, Walsh alleged, Clarridge had repeatedly lied to investigators, claiming that he had not known that the shipments he had helped North arrange contained weapons. Clarridge had stuck to the cover story that these shipments involved oil drilling equipment. Walsh asserted, "There was strong evidence that Clarridge's testimony was false."

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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/11/ben-carson-duane-clarridge-foreign-policy