Frank Gaffney

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr (born 1953) is the American founder and president of the think tank Center for Security Policy. He is a contributor and contributing editor for a number of publications, including the Washington Times, National Review Online, WorldNetDaily, and Jewish World Review.

Career

Congressional Staffer

In the late 1970s, Gaffney served as an aide to Senator Henry Jackson in the areas of defense and foreign policy.He worked closely with Richard Perle. From February 1981 to August 1983, Gaffney served on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Reagan administration

From August 1983 to November 1987, Gaffney served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy under Assistant Secretary Richard Perle.

In October 1985, Gaffney and Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, the director of the Strategic Defense Initiative, gave a briefing to delegates from the 16 NATO member states at a session of the North Atlantic Assembly in San Francisco. Gaffney warned that Russia has constructed the necessary radar network to defend the Soviet land mass and was heavily involved in exotic laser and particle beam research in an effort to shield itself totally from a missile attack.

Gaffney took part in negotiations which led to Israel joining the Strategic Defense Initiative in May 1986.

In September 1986, Gaffney argued against a complete nuclear test ban in a televised debate with a Soviet diplomat.

In a November 1986 roundtable at the Heritage Foundation, Gaffney accused the Soviet Union of violating the ABM Treaty:

their program of strategic defenses, which we estimate has absorbed 50 percent of Soviet strategic investment over the past several decades, is bearing fruit. There can be no question that the Soviet Union today is less vulnerable to strategic attack than is the United States. And with respect to the ABM Treaty itself, we have seen mounting evidence, some of which Jim Hackett has just alluded to, that the Soviets are prepared even to violate its explicit terms and limitations.

The implications over time of this sort of asymmetric approach to strategic defense speak for themselves. It poses a real and growing challenge to the security of the United States and indeed to the West as a whole to permit this asymmetric way of defending our people, our societies, and our values to continue as it has since 1972.

In a January 1987 Heritage Foundation lecture, Gaffney argued that the US had a greater need for nuclear testing because it relied on nuclear forces to counter an asymmetric conventional Soviet threat.

In February 1987, it was reported that Perle planned to resign from the Defense Department and was pushing for Gaffney as his successor. President Reagan nominated Gaffney for the post of assistant secretary of Defense for international security policy on 17 April.

In September 1987, arms control talks in Washington led to friction between the Defense and State departments after Pentagon officials were excluded from plenary sessions. Although other Pentagon officials were eventually allowed in, Gaffney remained excluded from the plenaries, which led to an agreement in principle to conclude an arms treaty.

Gaffney left the Government in November 1987:

With the retirement of Weinberger last week, Perle's ultimate link to the top was severed. Virtually the instant Weinberger departed and Frank Carlucci arrived, Gaffney was forced out. By midnight Friday, Gaffney's belongings were boxed and he was gone. On the spot, Gaffney called a press conference to express his "worries" about the Reagan administration's eagerness for an arms control agreement.

Almost immediately, rumors circulated that this was the beginning of a purge of the Perle network at the Pentagon, but Perle himself suggested that the ousting of his allies would run counter to the interests of the new defense secretary. "Frank Carlucci strikes me as too shrewd a bureaucrat to conduct a purge," he said yesterday.

According to one report, Carlucci reportedly ordered Gaffney to resign in an effort to get rid of critics of arms control. Another account said Gaffney quit after being told he would not be promoted to Assistant Secretary. William Safire claimed Gaffney's departure came about "Because he was Weinberger's man on George Shultz's most recent mission to Moscow, and sent a red-hot secret communication to his boss at Defense criticizing the meekness first shown in our reaction to Soviet demands that the summit meeting include a limitation on S.D.I. testing. Our Big Ear alerted Frank Carlucci, Cap's successor at Defense, who showed Mr. Gaffney the door. Senators will soon ask to see the critical cable."

Gaffney himself said he resigned because of fears that the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was being negotiated under the deadline of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting due on 7 December.

After Reagan accused critics of the treaty of accepting the "inevitability of war", Gaffney responded "It is our belief in the avoidability of war that makes us take these issues so seriously. It is our conviction that nuclear weapons, in particular, have been absolutely essential over the past 40 years to preventing war, of any kind."

Gaffney also questioned the provisions for verification of the treaty:

``Soviet resistance to meaningful, inclusive, on-site inspection is unabated, he said in an interview. ``The underlying question remains: Did we accede to their resistance to meaningful verification?

Think Tanker

By February 1988, Gaffney had moved to the American Enterprise Institute. That month, he took part in an AEI review of the INF Treaty with Perle, Douglas Feith, Michael Mobbs and Seymour Weiss. Their analysis concluded that effective verification of the agreement was nearly impossible. Also that month, conservative Senator Gordon Humphrey demanded that Perle and Gaffney be included in Senate hearings on the treaty.

In March 1988, Perle and Gaffney wrote to members of Congress opposing an agreement to allow Japan to obtain plutonium from US nuclear waste.

By May 1988, Gaffney had become a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

In October 1988, Gaffney warned against "the almost naive notion that peace is breaking out all over" because of Soviet peace initiatives.

"I personally believe it is a very thoughtful, carefully tailored and quite cynical effort (by Moscow) to promote precisely that impression, not just in the United States, but in Germany and rest of the Western world," he said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

In December 1988, Gaffney outlined his view of the threats facing the US to the AEI's annual policy conference:

I think, to a very considerable degree, the ability of a democracy like ours to meet its requirements of a global nature is a direct function of the perception, public popular perception in particular, of the degree to which those interests are threatened. As the perceived threat diminishes, irrespective of the actual threat -- as the perceived threat diminishes, generally speaking so does the priority accorded to resources made available to deal with that threat. And there are two important, hardly exclusive, but two important trends that are at work at the moment that infinitely complicate the task of ensuring the public properly understands the threat, properly perceives the threat. The one which Judy alluded to at the outset is, obviously, the very vigorous campaign being waged with considerable success by Mikhail Gorbachev, aimed at, as Georgi Arbatov let slip recently, denying us an enemy.

In January 1989, Gaffney criticised the Reagan administrations attempts to negotiate a ban on chemical weapons:

I think in a world in which we live, not the world necessarily we would like or the world that we could imagine and certainly the world that our negotiators will try to negotiate. We are going to have to have a continuing capability in this country to deter the use of chemical weapons against us and or allies and that means not giving up our own stockpile, modest though it is, of chemical weapons and, in fact, taking modest steps to modernize it.

In a March 1989 Brookings Institute seminar, Gaffney argued that the Soviet Union would continue to seek hegemony on the Eurasian landmass:

"It remains to be seen whether we can continue to defeat them in that objective, which I think is vital to our interest as well as that of Western Europe, now that we are facing a more subtle political and military agenda on the part of Mr. Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership. I think the Soviet interests, through arms control, through seduction, through economic entrapment, and other means of obtaining that objective, is unflagging. And we would be very poorly served if lose sight of that."

In May 1989, Gaffney criticised West German opposition to the modernisation of the Lance short range missile.A month later, tensions were reported within the Bush administration ahead of strategic arms reduction talks in Geneva:

The Pentagon's office of international security policy is packed with holdovers from the most hard-line elements of the Reagan administration. Its top civilians in charge of arms control, Mark Schendier and Bob Joseph, are proteges of Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney, the leading arms control hard-liners while Caspar W. Weinberger was Reagan's defense secretary.

One top Pentagon official said: "We don't have arms controllers in the Department of Defense. We have antiarms controllers."

In August 1989, Gaffney issued a CSP report calling for a moratorium on trade liberalisation with the Soviet Union, following the launch of an intelligence investigation into Felix S. Bloch, an official at the Stated Department's European Affairs Bureau. The report was endorsed by former government officials William Schneider, Kenneth deGraffenreid and Roger Robinson.

In September 1989, Gaffney told the Washington Times that President George H.W. Bush would nominate R. James Woolsey as a strategic arms negotiator in an attempt to reach out to Congressional Democrats. In the same article, Richard Perle said he would not object to the nomination.

In October, Gaffney noted that Bush officials had adopted a more positive tone towards perestrioka compared to the early months of the administration:

"The rhetoric was more cautious and more restrained, certainly than it is now. I think the actual policy that was being put into place was more consistent" with the current tone of administration statements, Mr. Gaffney said. He called the latter "a corrective action to bring the rhetoric into line with the policy."

Gaffney's Center for Security Policy released a position in November, which warned that a December summit would see Gorbachev demanding increased western support while cracking down on democratization at home.

"Gorbachev is saying that events in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe are making Soviet repression inevitable," Mr. Gaffney said. "Evidently the administration is disposed to view repressive actions as necessary - and by definition, acceptable - evils on the road to reform."

"What worries me is that we've begun to substitute the idea of helping Gorbachev for the idea of promoting change in the Soviet Union," Gaffney told Business Week, in an article which suggested that hardliners in the administration included Dick Cheney and Robert Gates. He reiterated this view in December, at an AEI policy conference on Arms control, where he spoke alongside Kenneth Adelman, Stephen Hadley and Patrick Glynn.

Gaffney was criticial of the outcome of the Malta summit:

"Mr Bush has precious little to show for his new commitment to a partnership with the Soviets - except the promise of new financial liabilities for US taxpayers in rescuing Moscow's failed economy, a continuing Soviet-sponsored effort to destabilise the Western Himisphere and the looming prospect of a raft of arms control agreements that will be neither carefully prepared, nor effectively verifiable nor in the interest of the US.

The Guardian's Martin Walker suggested that such views reflected a conservative constituency that Bush was not strong enough to ignore, and which was represented by administration figures such as Cheney.

With the iron curtain crumbling, Gaffney gave his view of what America's response should be in January 1990.

Very quickly, the key elements of our policy at this point, I think must be to maintain the defense structure that we have, including our Alliance arrangements. I think at least until we see what emerges from this devolving Soviet Union, that is the only appropriate policy. The corollary to that is that we must go slow on arms control, not accelerate it in order to make deals with Gorbachev while he lasts, which appears to be the Bush administration's policy. It's striking that in the Conventional Forces in Europe talks, the CFE talks, the outcome of doing so may well be to give a legitimacy, as Chris mentioned the Helsinki agreement did, to the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe that none of the East Europeans seem to wish to have.

Later that month, Gaffney said that plans to relax COCOM restrictions would be "a significant infusion of high-technology to the military sector of the Soviet Union". He reiterated the point in March:

"I'm afraid the biggest beneficiary of all this tech trade will be the Soviet military," says Frank Gaffney, a former deputy assistant Defense secretary. "The guy on the street in Poland won't be buying our computers. He can't even afford a loaf of bread."

Gaffney also spoke out against plans for a fibre-optic link with the Soviet Union.

"A Soviet fiber-optic network will . . . make it infinitely more difficult for the West to monitor Soviet communications, a decisive factor assessing leadership intentions, status of forces and preparations for conflict."

When an Iraqi weapons procurment programme was broken up in Britain in 1990, Gaffney Commented "There is no doubt these weapons are aimed against Israel. But that's not the only target."

For Gaffney, the Iraqi successes reveal the control regime's shortcomings more than its failure. "Since we cannot stop the proliferation of missile technology, we should deploy anti-ballistic missile systems" such as the joint U.S.-Israeli "Arrow" project, Brilliant Pebbles (an SDI concept), and a ground-based point defense system, Gaffney argues. "These would be an infinitely more powerful disincentive than MTCR to any government thinking of investing a significant portion of its treasury in acquiring missile technology."

When the USSR cut off supplies to Vilnius following its unilateral declaration of independence, Gaffney said it was a "scam" to believe the USSR would ever let the country go. "Bush's inability even to impose 'Potemkin' economic sanctions in response to Gorbachev's crackdown on Lithuania amounts to writing a blank check,", he said.

Following the murder of Dr Gerald Bull, Gaffney suggested Bull's illicit arms trading might have been overlooked:

"The truth is the administration of export controls from this country is a sometime thing," he said. "When you talk about policing exports from third countries, it's a very erratic thing." But "there is always the possibility we or other countries were looking the other way," he added.

In an April 1990 commentary for the Washington Times, Gaffney attacked attempts to cancel the V-22 Osprey programme, which he called "the most promising aerospace development since the invention of the jet engine".

In May 1990, Gaffney criticised negotiations to remove short-range nuclear weapons from Germany.

"This administration has been too willing to give away things it doesn't have to," said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy. "The Soviets are in the position of a river boat gambler. They have no cards, and unfortunately they are likely to get the pot."

Affiliations

According to the Modern History Project, the following are Gaffney's affiliations:

• American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus
• Center for Security Policy
• Committee on the Present Danger - Member
• Family Security Matters – member, board of advisors (dates uncertain)
• Foundation for the Defense of Democracies - Distinguished Advisor
• Georgetown University – B.A. Foreign Service
• Project for the New American Century - Signatory
• School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) – M.A. International Studies
• United States Committee for a Free Lebanon - 'Golden Circle' supporter
• United States Department of Defense – Officer of, 1983 to 1987; Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy (Reagan administration)
• United States Legislative Branch – Officer of, 1981 to 1983; Staff Member, Senate Armed Services Committee
• Zionist Organization of America
• Center for Security Policy - Contributor to CSP front group Family Security Matters

Other affiliations include:

• Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, Signatory February 1998 letter
• Middle East Forum - Study Participant, May 2000
• Coalition for Liberty, Security, and the Law - Signatory
• Washington Times - Columnist
• Defense News - Monthly Contributor
• Investor's Business Daily - Monthly Contributor
• Benador Associates - Expert Speaker
• Ariel Center for Policy Research - Contributing Expert
• National Review Online - Contributing Editor
• Americans for Victory over Terrorism - Former Senior Advisor
• Set America Free Coalition - Member
• International Free Press Society - Board of Advisors

Connections

• Devon Gaffney Cross - sister
• Henry Jackson
• Richard Perle

External Resources

• Frank Gaffney - Rightweb profile
• Frank Gaffney - History Commons profile
• Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. Archives - Jewish World Review columns
• Gaffney, Frank J. Jr. - MediaTransparency Profile
• GAFFNEY FRANK J JR Namebase bibliography
• Frank J. Gaffney, Jr - Sourcewatch profile