Articles
Special Report, Pages 17-18
Dr. Strangelove, Made in Israel
By Philip Giraldi
ONE would expect the Air Force's top civilian adviser to be someone who has spent some time in the U.S. military or who has a very particular education, or skill set that brings something special to what is, after all, a very senior and sensitive position. Not so. Dr. Lani Kass, senior special assistant to the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, was born, raised, and educated in Israel and then served in that country's military, where she reached the rank of major. She has a Ph.D. in Russian studies but advises Air Force generals on cyberwarfare, terrorism, and the Middle East.
Dr. Lani Kass is married to Norman Kass, a former Pentagon deputy assistant secretary of defense, and resides in McLean, Virginia. She has been naturalized as a U.S. citizen and is presumably a dual national who now holds both American and Israeli passports. Her three children were all born in Israel. While it is perhaps not unusual for American citizens to volunteer with the Israel Defense Forces, as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel did in 1991, it would have to be considered unprecedented for a senior Israeli military officer to obtain a high level position at the Pentagon. In fact, it is hard to imagine that anyone carrying out a security background investigation would approve such a transition under any circumstances, suggesting the possibility that Kass' ascent to high office might have been aided or even godfathered by friends in key positions who were able to override or circumvent normal procedures.
Indeed, Kass appears to have close and continuing ties to her country of birth, frequently spicing her public statements with comments about life in Israel while parroting simplistic views of the nature of the Islamic threat that might have been scripted in Tel Aviv's Foreign Ministry.
Information has come to light on Kass that heightens my concern about her high position in the United States government's defense and security establishment. According to a highly reliable source, Dr. Lani Kass is now the principal adviser to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen regarding the Middle East. She recently was involved in a very important meeting—one that concerned Israel.
The meeting took place because of concerns that the United States has been losing the "war of ideas" in the Muslim world. At the end of last year, Gen. David Petraeus sent a special emissary out on a fact-finding mission to meet with the heads of state and top military officers in all of the Muslim countries considered to be friends or allies of the U.S. for a frank exchange of views. The emissary, an Arabic speaker, learned that no country any longer trusts the United States because it is widely believed that all American policies in the Near East region are subject to veto by Israel. It was also commonly observed that Washington is complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians because of its failure to do anything to restrain Israel, making it extremely difficult to rally popular support in any Muslim country for U.S. policies.
Petraeus was surprised by the unanimity and emotion of the views that were confidentially expressed, and thought the issue to be important enough to move it up the chain of command. In February, he met with Admiral Mullen and briefed him on his findings [see May/June 2010 Washington Report, p. 11]. Mullen was accompanied only by Dr. Lani Kass, who was described to Petraeus as his special assistant for the Middle East. Mullen expressed some dismay at the implications of the findings, while Kass disputed Petraeus' conclusions and said that the concerns being expressed were greatly exaggerated. Petraeus nevertheless presented his report to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 17 together with his judgment that the failure to address the Palestinian issue was putting U.S. soldiers in danger because it was inflaming anti-American sentiment and giving groups like al-Qaeda an unnecessary propaganda victory.
You Can Take the Girl Out of Israel...
Dr. Kass' full first name is Ilana and her maiden name is Dimant. She has a 1971 B.A. in political science and Russian area studies, summa cum laude, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a 1976 joint Ph.D. from the Kaplan School of the Hebrew University and Columbia University in international affairs. She apparently met her husband, Norman, at Columbia. Both she and her husband are fluent in Russian and Hebrew. After completing her Ph.D., she served in the Israeli Air Force, achieving the rank of major. For those who are unfamiliar with the military, the rank of major is a senior rank that normally would be awarded to a career officer.
Her first job in Washington was with the Advanced International Studies Institute (AISI), a Washington, DC area-based think tank. After being recommended by someone at the Pentagon, she was hired for her Russian-language skills in an unclassified program funded by the Department of Defense called Soviet Watch. Her fellow employees understood that she was a former major in Israeli intelligence. Some months after she departed AISI, one of her colleagues received a call from a personnel manager at the Industrial War College asking to confirm Kass's employment with AISI. The Industrial War College was, as the name implies, an institute set up to coordinate industrial production with Defense Department needs. Some of its work was classified. Kass' colleague told the caller that Kass was an intelligence officer who thought of herself as an Israeli and added that putting her in any position of influence would be a bad idea.
A few months later she moved on to Beltway bandit Booz Allen Hamilton's Russian Research Center, where she worked between 1979 and 1981. Between 1985 and 2005 she held the position of professor of military strategy and operations of the National War College. In 1992 Dr. Kass obtained a senior position at the Pentagon as special assistant to the director, Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate (J5). Dick Cheney was secretary of defense at the time. She returned to the Pentagon under Secretary William Cohen and stayed on during 2000-2001 as senior policy adviser and special assistant for strategic initiatives to the director, Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate (J5) under Donald Rumsfeld.
Kass' powerpoint demonstration "A Warfighting Domain," dated Sept. 26, 2006, is more than a little Strangelovean in its language and appeal. It includes a map taken from an obscure Jihadi Web site showing the entire world depicted as the "United States of Islam," in which everyone will have to follow shariah Muslim law, and defines the "mission" as "to fly and fight in the Air, Space, and Cyberspace." She boasts, "as Airmen we are the nation's premier multi-dimensional maneuver force, with the agility, reach, speed, stealth, payload, precision, and persistence to deliver global effects at the speed of sound and the speed of light." Her objective? To "foster a force of 21st century warriors, capable of delivering the full spectrum of kinetic and non-kinetic, lethal and non-lethal effects in the Air, Space, and Cyber domains."
In early November 2006, U.S. Air Force officials formed the Air Force Cyberspace Command that had the "authority to launch wars in cyberspace." The command was reported to be "largely the brainchild of Dr. Lani Kass, director of the Air Force Cyberspace Task Force."
In a speech at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho on July 9, 2007, Kass said radical Muslims hate the Western world because Europe took their dominant political position away and they want it back. She also compared all Americans to sheep and sheepdogs. The former keep their heads down hoping that someone else will be eaten by wolves—a.k.a. terrorists—while the latter fight back. Kass sees herself as a sheepdog. For her Air Force audience she concluded that the long war against the Islamists will end "when they learn to love their children more than they hate us," a comment originally attributed to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
A Two-Decade Ascent
From there and then to here and now has taken more than 20 years, proceeding through a number of Defense Department positions with ever-increasing responsibility and access. It would not be out of place to observe that if the report that Kass was truly an intelligence officer for the Israel Defense Forces is correct, the Department of Defense security screeners should have erred on the side of caution based on the supposition that she was still in touch with her former employers. She should never have been given a security clearance and provided access to United States classified information in the first place, which again raises the issue of just if and how thoroughly her background was actually investigated.
And it is also not unreasonable to stop and consider whether Kass might well be an agent working for the Israeli government, which aggressively spies against the United States. She left Israel and began her journey through the U.S. Defense Department in 1981, when Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard was still active. Israeli intelligence certainly was then and is now capable of what is referred to in intelligence jargon as a seeding operation, in which "a mole" is placed in an innocuous position and expected to rise higher, eventually obtaining access to top secret information and even sometimes winding up in a position in which it is possible to direct policy as a so-called agent of influence. Kass started her ascent by working on Russia for AISI, followed by Booz Allen Hamilton, quite likely for completely innocent reasons, but also possibly because it was a non-threatening way to ease her entry into the world of government contractors.
In seeking to discover how she wound up where she is now, it is fair to ask how exactly she obtained the positions that she has held with the Pentagon and who sponsored her through the bureaucracy. How did she manage to obtain a clearance in spite of the obvious red flags in her background? In light of legitimate security concerns, has she been polygraphed, what questions about her relationship with her former country were asked, and what were her answers? Was any deception indicated? Has she been re-polygraphed recently? This is not intended as harassment or as any accusation against Kass, but rather to determine if she has been subject to normal and appropriate security measures. CIA officers are, for example, required to undergo polygraph exams every five years and the questions concentrate on possible unreported relationships with foreign governments.
Critics note that while Kass is genuinely an expert on Russia, she has little background to qualify her as an authority on the currently fashionable cyberwarfare, where she has somehow turned herself into a major spokesman through mastery of the necessary buzzwords and talking points. Nor does she have any genuine expertise on the Middle East or on terrorism to share with Mullen and others, apart from her own Israeli perspective. Her access to the highest levels of the Air Force also raises the questions of just what is she advising and what does she know? Does she support an air war against Iran, for example, and is she actively promoting that option? Does she know how the Obama administration will react if Tel Aviv tries to stage a unilateral attack on Iran? Such information would be pure gold for the Israeli government.
There are indications that Dr. Kass is a major player in shaping U.S. security policy. She has been described as a "key participant" in the development of the national strategy for combating terrorism, as well as the national military strategic plan for the Global War on Terrorism.
One might argue that Dr. Lani Kass is just another Israel firster who has risen to high office in the U.S. government, not really unlike Dennis Ross, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and Douglas Feith. And that might well be true. But at the same time, one must challenge the judgment of those who enabled her rise to a position of great responsibility and power, and there should be serious questions about whether her bellicose and racially tinged viewpoint comes from objective and honest analysis of the genuine challenges confronting the United States or from her loyalty to her country of birth.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and a fellow at the American Conservative Defense Alliance. This article is a synthesis of two of the author's articles first posted on Antiwar.com, <www.antiwar.com>, April 15 and 21, 2010. Copyright © Antiwar.com 2010. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
