Sleeping With The Devil by Robert Baer

remain
    there. Unofficially, and more accurately, the program assures that a percentage of all arms
    sales to the Saudis are siphoned off into fees and commissions to businesses owned almost
    entirely by royal family members.
        Carlyle has also made a fortune through buying up small defense
    contractors and flipping them to defense giants like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and TRW
    International, a major weapons provider to the Saudis. Along the way, it bought its own arms
    business, United Defense, America’s eleventh largest defense contractor. As the world’s largest
    consumer of U.S.-made armaments, Saudi Arabia virtually makes the secondary market for American
    fighter planes, missiles, tanks, armored vehicles, and other weaponry and supporting services.
    Saudi Arabia was also the second largest consumer, after the U.S. military, of the Bradley
    Fighting Vehicle, which was for many years the mainstay of United Defense’s product line.
        In Washington, to bring up the “revolving door” between government and
    business is like discussing incest in the family. But Washington’s franchise players head
    straight for the Carlyle employment office as soon as they’re out of the government.
        In addition to serving as a professional home for James Baker and Frank
    Carlucci, Carlyle also employs Arthur Levitt, former head of the Securities and Exchange
    Commission; William Kennard, who chaired the Federal Communications Commission during the
    second Clinton administration; Afsaneh Beschloss, former treasurer and chief investment officer
    of the World Bank and wife of historian Michael Beschloss, a regular on PBS’s The NewsHour
    with Jim Lehrer; and Richard Darman, who ran the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under
    the first president Bush and, during the Reagan administration, served as assistant to the
    president and the Treasury deputy secretary. Just to prove that Carlyle is truly an
    international conglomerate, former British prime minister John Major serves as chairman of
    Carlyle Europe.
        No one in Washington has better contacts or has worked them more
    effectively than Frank Carlucci. In addition to his posts as defense secretary and national
    security adviser, Carlucci was deputy director of the CIA from 1978 to 1980, after a stint as
    ambassador to Portugal. He also competed on the Princeton University wrestling team with Donald
    Rumsfeld and has stayed friendly with him in the years since.[text omitted]
        In 1972 Carlucci was deputy to Caspar Weinberger at Richard Nixon’s
    Office of Management and Budget when a new White House fellow named Colin Powell, on loan from
    the U.S. Army, reported for work. Eight years later, when Ronald Reagan made Weinberger
    secretary of defense, Powell became his senior military adviser. In 1987 Carlucci, who had been
    serving as assistant to the president for national security affairs, succeeded Weinberger as
    secretary of defense, and Powell stepped into Carlucci’s slot as national security adviser.
    (Carlucci likes to call himself Powell’s godfather.)
        Carlyle did its own godfather schtick for George W. Bush as well. Back
    in 1990, when the future president was wandering the Lone Star State in search of a career,
    Republican insider Fred Malek found Bush a slot on the board of a Carlyle subsidiary: Caterair,
    an airline-catering company. A decade later, when Bush II was governor of Texas, the state
    teachers’ pension fund invested $100 million with the Carlyle Group.
        Carlyle’s most famous adviser is George Herbert Walker Bush, the
    forty-first president of the United States. Greatly admired among the monied classes in Saudi
    Arabia and Kuwait for their leadership in the Gulf War, Bush and John Major have traveled
    frequently to both places on Carlyle’s behalf, opening the doors to some of the world’s most
    well-heeled investors. Indeed, even as his son was campaigning for the presidency in 2000, Papa
    Bush flew