Abstract

Agents of Influence

The article looks at an inquiry being held by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into whether Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, ran a covert program with operatives in high-level U.S. government positions to influence the President George W. Bush Administration's decision to go to war in Iraq. According to sources familiar with the investigation, the FBI is looking at a group of neoconservatives who have occupied senior posts at the White House, the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office. The point of the probe is not to examine the push to war but rather to ascertain whether Sharon recruited or helped place in office people who knowingly, and secretly, worked with him to affect the direction of U.S. policy in the Middle East. The most likely targets of the inquiry are Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and Harold Rhode of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment.