Fred C. Iklé

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Person.png Fred C. Iklé   History Commons SourcewatchRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(deep state operative)
Fred C. Iklé.jpg
Born21 August 1924
Samedan, Switzerland.
Died10 November 2011 (Age 87)
NationalityUS
Alma materUniversity of Zurich, University of Chicago
Member ofCenter for Security Policy/National Security Advisory Council, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Le Cercle, Project for the New American Century, RAND/Notable Participants
Interests • Mujahedin
• Operation Cyclone
• Psyops
• Polwar
US deep state operative in the Reagan Administration, where he was proponent of psyops and supporting insurgencies. Attended Le Cercle RAND Corporation, Smith Richardson Foundation, National Endowment for Democracy , Center for Strategic and International Studies...

Employment.png US/Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Wikipedia-icon.png

In office
April 2, 1981 - February 19, 1988
Appointed byRonald Reagan
Under Reagan

Fred C. Iklé was US Deep state operative. He was employed as Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Reagan Administration.[1]

Background

Iklé was born in Samedan, Switzerland. He moved to the United States in 1946. In addition to positions at the Rand Corp., Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he worked in the Nixon and Ford administrations as director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.[2][3]

Reagan Administration

According to Frances Fitzgerald, Caspar Weinberger's lack of experience in the portfolio meant that the appointments to the Department of Defense were heavily influenced by Senate Republicans and conservative campaign advisors. Iklé's appointment was one product of this, as were the appointments of John Lehman, Jr. and Richard Perle. All three had been allies in the seventies and involved with the Committee on the Present Danger.[4]

Iklé complained about the CIA's Office of Soviet Analysis after it revised down its estimate of Soviet military spending in 1983.[5]

SDI

In 1985, Iklé told the Senate Armed Services Committee: "The Strategic Defense Initiative is not an optional program, at the margin of the defense effort. It's central, at the very core of our long term policy for reducing the risk of nuclear war."[6] In April 1985, after a Pentagon report raised doubts about the admissibility of SDI under the ABM Treaty, Iklé and Perle hired Philip Kunsberg, a New York lawyer with no experience of arms control, who reached a contrary opinion.[7]

Afghanistan

From early 1985, Iklé was an influential member of the Policy Review Group which controlled US covert action in Afghanistan.[8] At one meeting that spring he suggested that US planes should drop weapons into Afghanistan by parachute.

Someone asked: What if the Russians begin shooting down the U.S. planes and ignite World War III? "Hmmm," Iklé answered, according to Thomas Twetten, a senior officer in the CIA's clandestine service. "World War III. That's not such a bad idea." If he said such a thing , Ikle said later, he must have been kidding. But Twetten remembered "a roomful of dumbstruck people."[9]

Iklé and Michael Pillsbury visited Islamabad on 30 April 1985 to brief ISI chief General Akhtar Abdur Rahman on the planned expansion of US covert action in Afghanistan.[10]

Iklé was also involved in the Contras in Nicaragua.[2]

Psychological operations

“Approximate military parity between the superpowers enhances the importance of PSYOP and POLWAR [Political Warfare]. Major adversaries equally armed and equally capable of destroying each other must turn away from shooting wars to settle their genuine conflicts. POLWAR and PSYOP pose a lower risk of escalation. Our era has become the age of terrorism, insurgency, and limited war because each of these is an essentially political method of struggle. In this era of superpower confrontation, it is no longer facetious to set Clausewitz' dictum, "War is the continuation of politics by other means," on its head. In our modern world, international politics is the continuation of war by other means.”
Fred Iklé (1986)  [11]


Affiliations

 

Events Participated in

EventStartEndLocation(s)Description
Colloquium on Analysis and Estimates30 November 19791 December 1979Spooky 1979 Washington conference
Colloquium on Intelligence Requirements for the 1990s4 December 19875 December 1987Spooky 1987 conference
Le Cercle/1985 (Washington)7 January 198510 January 1985US
Washington DC
4 day meeting of Le Cercle in Washington exposed after Joel Van der Reijden discovered the attendee list for this conference and published it online in 2011
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References

  1. "Fred C. Iklé", Center for Strategic and International Studies, accessed 14 March 2010.
  2. a b https://web.archive.org/web/20130122203532/http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-11-16/local/35282581_1_war-plan-nuclear-arms-control-richard-perle
  3. https://web.archive.org/web/20090902191710/http://csis.org/expert/fred-c-ikl%C3%A9
  4. Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan: Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, Touchstone, 2000, p.294.
  5. Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan: Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, Touchstone, 2000, p.330.
  6. Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan: Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, Touchstone, 2000, p.243.
  7. Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan: Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, Touchstone, 2000, p.295.
  8. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, Penguin, 2005, p.126.
  9. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, Penguin, 2005, p.128.
  10. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, Penguin, 2005, p.126.
  11. https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/139664/1989-01_Political_Warfare_8-Chap.pdf