Carlucci was Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration from
1987 to 1989, following Caspar Weinberger (1981- 1987).
Frank Carlucci is one of the Gang of Four - four protocons (protoconservatives) who, having originally worked closely together in the Nixon Administration, would each become a Defense Secretary in later Administrations: Rumsfeld, Cheney, Carlucci and Weinberger.
This is a tight-knit group of individuals. In various combinations and under various administrations, they
have sought, since the days of Nixon, to promote the right-wing conservative agenda that failed to come to fruition when the Nixon administration collapsed under the weight of the Watergate scandal [see Elliot Richardson].
In 1956, after study at Harvard, Carlucci joined the Department of State as a foreign service officer.
He was a CIA operative during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, serving in South Africa, the Congo, Zanzibar, and Brazil
between 1957 and 1969.
Carlucci has been identified as having played a key role in the successful plot to assassinatePatrice Lumumba in 1960. The events are depicted in a recently released film, 'Lumumba'. By the time the film aired on HBO in early 2002, Carlucci had succeeded in getting the distributor to hide his character's identity, by bleeping his name from the film.
In 1960, [Carlucci] was the second secretary in the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa, the Congo. That was the time when, according to declassified U.S. State Department cables and testimony to the Senate's Church committee on assassinations, the United States plotted with the incipient dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and the Belgians to bring down Patrice Lumumba, the popular nationalist leader who'd been chosen prime minister by a Brussels "roundtable" of Congo leaders. Lumumba's sin was that, when neither the Americans nor the United Nations would help him against Belgian-organized plots to destabilize his government, he turned to the Russians.
After an extensive parliamentary investigation, the Belgian prime minister earlier this month apologized to the Lumumba family for his country's role in the killing, an apology accepted by Lumumba's son. Carlucci, however, appears to have no regrets.
The scene he doesn't like shows U.S. Ambassador Clare Timberlake and an American that the uncensored film identifies as Carlucci in a meeting plotting Lumumba's murder. The Carlucci character is an oily fellow who makes a clearly disingenuous comment about how the U.S. doesn't "meddle" in other countries' affairs. [For more details on this in-depth report, see [1]
D'Lynn Waldron an American journalist who covered these events at the time, is described as 'a supporter of Lumumba and one of his primary voices to the West'. [2] Waldron had this to say about Carlucci:
Right up to his being turned over to Katanga to be assassinated, Lumumba pinned his hopes on America and his travelling companion and confidant was Frank Carlucci, who it has since been revealed in Congressional investigations was an American intelligence officer and presumably part of Operation Zaire Rifle, the American plot to assassinate Lumumba. [3]
The fact that Lumumba was assassinated three days before John F. Kennedy was sworn in is thought by some to be significant.
[4]
In 1969, in the Nixon Administration, Carlucci began his career as a government bureaucrat as assistant director at the Office of Economic Opportunity under Donald Rumsfeld, friend, classmate, roommate and wrestling partner at Princeton. At that time, Richard Cheney also worked at OEO under Rumsfeld [5]; Carlucci became director late in 1970;
BETWEEN 1971 AND 1989, Carlucci held the following posts [6]:
1989 & after: [George HW Bush Administration]: Vice President, Managing Director, and later Chairman of theCarlyle Group
After he left the Pentagon, Carlucci joined the Carlyle Group [in which George H.W. Bush was to play a prominent role after his presidency], a Washington investment partnership, as vice president and managing director; he later became chairman. In the ensuing years, he wrote, spoke, and testified frequently on defense issues. He addressed again the problem of congressional micromanagement of DoD, continued to advocate rail deployment of the MX, and supported the new B-2 bomber as necessary in the nuclear deterrent triad. [7]
The Carlyle Group is ...
... a private equity investment group with billions of dollars of assets in the defense industry and a roster of directors and consultants which includes not only well-known Reagan and Bush appointees but also international figures like John Major, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Fidel Ramos, the former President of the Philippines.
The Chairmanof the Carlyle Group, Frank Carlucci, was not only a former Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, but a Deputy Director of the CIA during the Carter Administration. In fact, Carlucci's career in Washington provides some insight into the intersection between foreign and domestic policy in the Cold War years. Moreover, Carlucci's particular trajectory through the government and into private industry reveals much about the meaning and influence of the military-industrial complex in the past and continuing policies of the United States at home and abroad.
Carlucci has also held positions on other boards, including:
Following in the footsteps of several other former defense officials (including former defense secretary Caspar Weinburger and former national security adviser William P Clark), Carlucci is Chairman of the board of the US-Taiwan Business Council; he played a crucial role in recent US-Taiwan talks. He has had extensive contacts with the Chinese government through Nortel Networks, where he served as chairman from 1999 to 2001 [9]
Carlucci is also on the board of Populex, the company that is setting up electronic voting in the state of Illinois. - Democracy Now!: [text][video][audio]
