Recent Hiring Spree WestExec Advisors Reveals, a Viper's Nest of War Criminals Whose Founders Include Anthony Blinken, Shows Politics Ends, as Always, at the Water's Edge
WestExec is one of the premiere firms in the bipartisan corporate intelligence industry, where former national security officials give their all to getting rich and expanding the American empire.
Ken Silverstein 10/11/24
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, formerly of WestExec Advisors, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog, two of the most morally repellent people on the planet, shake hands during a meeting at the US Embassy in Jerusalem in November of 2023. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Last month, WestExec Advisors, one of Washington’s most prominent corporate intelligence firms, announced that former Deputy National Security Advisor JD Crouch II had joined the firm as a Principal. “Over a long career in public service, academia, and the private sector, JD has developed deep expertise in the defense and national security issues confronting the United States and our allies,” stated the press release announcing Crouch had come aboard. “Drawing on that expertise to help guide clients through an increasingly challenging global business environment, he will be an invaluable part of the WestExec team.”
Crouch is one of at least eight ex-military and intelligence veterans hired since May by WestExec, which was established by a quartet of former top officials from Barack Obama’s administration. Two weeks after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election, Politico labeled the firm the new president’s “Cabinet in Waiting.” Among the senior WestExec executives who went on to take jobs in the new administration were incoming Secretary of State Antony Blinken, one of the company’s four co-founders who’d been Obama’s principal deputy national security advisor and whose family name will forever be stained due to his central role promoting Israeli genocide; Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who during her years as CIA Deputy Director “was sometimes summoned in the middle of the night to weigh in on whether a suspected terrorist could be lawfully incinerated by a drone strike,” Newsweek wrote in 2013; and David Cohen, her replacement as Deputy Director who previously worked at the Treasury Department where he helped write the section of the USA PATRIOT Act and subsequently became known as a “financial Batman.”
WestExec is often described as a Democratic firm, but Crouch is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. He worked at the Pentagon under Presidents George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, and was a military advisor to former Wyoming Senator Malcolm Wallop.
Indeed, WestExec’s senior ranks are mainly populated by Democrats, but there are plenty of Republicans as well, and the same bipartisan spirit of camaraderie is true throughout virtually the entire corporate intelligence industry. That’s because — as is the case with lobbying and PR shops, think tanks, and other influence peddling entities where cash is thicker than blood — the companies’ bread and butter depends on maintaining fraternal relations with both parties in order to help their clients win federal contracts, subsidies, and other forms of budgetary slush.
This shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s obscured by much of the mainstream media and more openly craven hacks such as Rachel Maddow at MSNBC and Scott Dworkin at Occupy Democrats who would have you believe Kamala Harris is a modern day Mahatma Gandhi, and their MAGA World counterparts like Jesse Watters at Fox News and “independent journalists” Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who suggest Trump is being undermined by the Democratic-dominated Deep State because he’s an enemy of American imperialism. These viewpoints are both embarrassingly stupid, and for the same reason: they’re partisan perspectives designed with the specific intent of obscuring the fact that both major parties are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the 0.1 percent and the corporate oligarchy.
Democrats are all about peace, love, and understanding when they talk about gay rights and abortion, but they’re largely indistinguishable from Republicans on foreign and national security policy. Trump — who wants to nuke Iran back into the Stone Age and derides Biden as an enemy of Israel — is not an enemy of the Deep State nor does the Deep State exist, at least the way it’s conceived of by MAGA shills and useful idiots.
America is run by a ruling class that’s born and bred to exercise power. Its members attend the same universities, have positions at the same think tanks between stints in government, are board members at the same corporations and advisors to the same hedge funds and private equity firms, and hold executive positions at the same access-dependent, door-opening corporate intelligence and advisory firms — and that last category leads to WestExec, which is a particularly instructive example.
Anthony Blinken’s fellow co-founders at WestExec Advisors. Screenshot from company website.
“WestExec Advisors brings the Situation Room to the Board Room,” boasts the firm’s website, which calls its corporate directorate “an unparalleled group of this generation’s thought leaders and senior practitioners in national security and international affairs.” Blinken is currently tied up helping Israel rape, pillage, and murder its way across the Middle East and possibly trigger a nuclear holocaust, but his equally dedicated, upstanding co-founders and managing partners are still on hand to held WestExec’s lucky clients. The firm doesn’t disclose its clients, however a few were revealed in disclosure forms filed by Blinken and Haines when they went to work for Biden, among others Blackstone, Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Palantir, and Uber.
At the top of the current managing partnership slop heap in terms of brand name recognition is Michèle Flournoy, who Kelley Beaucar Vlahos of the Quincy Institute and Responsible Statecraft once succinctly captured in an interview with me as “a courtier-turned-businesswoman and influencer in the imperial city.” An Under Secretary of Defense for Policy under Obama, Flournoy “led the development of the Department of Defense’s 2012 Strategic Guidance and represented the Department in dozens of foreign engagements, in the media and before Congress,” reads her WestExec bio. She also is a co-founder of Center for a New American Security, a bipartisan think tank heavily financed by weapons manufacturers such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, and has been a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Sergio Aguirre “has a wide variety of experience in the national security arena, including working as Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to Senator Tim Kaine, serving on the National Security Council Staff at the White House as a Director for the Middle East and North Africa, as well as working at the Department of Defense on Middle East issues and as a Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy,” says WestExec’s website. It also highlights Aguirre’s past status as an Associate Vice President for International Advocacy with PhRMA and his role on the 2015 roster of the “top 40 under 40 Latinos in foreign policy.”
Rounding out the crew is Nitin Chadda, an ex-Senior Advisor for Strategy to Obama’s Pentagon chieftain Ash Carter, RIP. Chadda also “served at the White House on the National Security Council with a focus on the Near East, as well as on various defense and intelligence policy matters.”
Other prominent present and past WestExec VIPs include:
John Brennan, Principal
Brennan, who also has a position at Kissinger Associates, worked for the CIA for 25 years and was the agency’s director under Obama between 2013 and 2016. Obama had originally nominated him to be director shortly after being inaugurated to begin his first term, but Brennan withdrew his name from consideration in the face of heavy criticism over his support of torture against accused terrorists when he served as CIA deputy executive director during the George W. Bush administration. Obama then named him assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, which didn’t require Senate approval.
Elbridge Colby, former Senior Advisor
A top China hawk who was appointed to the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense by Trump and is likely to be given a senior national security position if the former president defeats Harris in November, Colby is the grandson of former CIA Director William Colby. A profile of Colby in Politico portrayed him as “straight out of central casting for a member of DC's foreign policy elite" and noted his “coiffed hair,” "blue-blood" pedigree, and attendance at both Harvard and Yale. Colby, who worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq following the US-led invasion in 2003, is best known nowadays as the co-founder and principal of the Marathon Initiative, which receives most of its funding from the Pentagon and conservative foundations. “How to secure American freedom and prosperity in this more competitive age is the organizing national security question of our time,” says the think tank’s website. “The mission of The Marathon Initiative is to develop the diplomatic, military, and economic strategies the nation will need to navigate a protracted competition with great power rivals.” He previously was affiliated with Flournoy’s Center for a New American Security.
Joe Maguire, Principal
Maguire is a former SEAL who retired from the Navy in 2010 with the rank of Vice Admiral. Trump nominated him to be the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center and Acting Director of National Intelligence, and he was the principal advisor to the President on the National Security Council and at the Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters related to National Security. Before joining WestExec, Maguire was a Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton “focused on support to America’s Special Operations forces.”
Dennis Ross, Senior Advisor
A Distinguished Fellow at the right-wing Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Ross was named Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director at the National Security Council under Obama. He was also Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s special advisor on Iran and a top advisor to Secretary of State James Baker during President George H. W. Bush’s administration. “Dennis…was instrumental in assisting Israelis and Palestinians to reach the 1995 Interim Agreement; he also successfully brokered the 1997 Hebron Accord, facilitated the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, and intensively worked to bring Israel and Syria together,” states his corporate bio, which is a stellar track record that makes Ross a “highly skilled diplomat,” according to the bio, but in the real world amounts to a career better summarized as “unblemished by success.”
WestExec Advisors brings together a veritable political, social, racial and gender rainbow of national security war masterminds. The ghastly Stengel, a former editor of Time who went on to help create the the State Department’s Global Engagement Center to combat “disinformation around the world, is one of several former journalists who now currently or previously worked for WesteExec, including Blinken, who co-edited The Harvard Crimson when earning his degree in War Crimes Management and Cover Ups, and ex-intern for The New Republic. Screenshot from company website.
WestExec’s recent hiring spree began in May when the firm named Sean Kirkpatrick, the Pentagon's “former chief UFO tracker,” as a Senior Advisor. That was his last post in a public sector career of nearly three decades that saw Kirkpatrick work “across the Navy, Air Force, wider Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and White House.” Career highlights noted by his WestExec bio include establishing the Intelligence Enterprise for the US Space Command and leading the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office created by the Biden administration.
The following month WestExec announced the addition of two more Senior Advisors, starting with Henry Haggard, who signed up shortly after departing from the State Department, where he’d worked for the previous quarter-century. His final posting was as Director for Energy Diplomacy responsible for policy related to the Middle East and Asia, and Haggard had also held positions on the National Security Council and been stationed in Iraq and France.
Erica Barks Ruggles, the second senior official to joined the firm in June, had been a “highly respected diplomat and national security policymaker” who WestExec snatched up to “advise clients on a variety of geopolitical risk and business strategy issues, including those related to operations and investments in African countries.” Ruggles’s government experience would serve her well there as she’d been Ambassador to Rwanda from 2015 to 2018, “where she played a pivotal role in strengthening bilateral relations and advancing US interests in the region,” and served for three years on the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee as Director for African Affairs.”
WestExec scored another two-for on August 13 when it named two more Senior Advisors: outgoing Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Shawn Barnes and Biden’s Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Council Coordinator Katie Tobin. Barnes held top spots at the Pentagon under Obama, Trump and Biden, whereas during her years of public service Tobin, who’s currently a nonresident scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had become an “expert in a range of homeland security, immigration, and refugee issues.”
The firm’s hiring spree included two other ex-senior officials before coming to a close when Crouch was announced on September 19. New names will undoubtedly be announced shortly as WestExec is constantly poaching from the public sector, with other hires during the past few years including Kevin Higgins, whose last government job was Chief of Staff to current CIA Director William Burns, and Paul Farley, another agency alumni whose last position was Assistant Director for South and Central Asia.
WestExec may be predominantly Democratic but many of its competitors are inversely skewed Republican. Casting any of them as being entirely beholden to either party is misleading, though, because the corporate intelligence sector is staffed overwhelmingly by former government officials who are dedicated to making as much money as possible while working to preserve and expand America’s global political and military empire.
Depicting WestExec and other firms in the industry in a partisan fashion is best left to the two party’s propagandists, their allied hacks in the media, and other moral cretins and dimwits.