Alexis Debat’s Pentagon Links: Did the Discredited ABC Consultant Get DOD Money Too?

A D.C. think tank confirms that it retained Debat on a Pentagon project; relationship is over “as of today.”

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


As Mother Jones first reported last week, Alexis Debat, the terrorism expert and former ABC News consultant who published alleged interviews with the likes of Barack Obama that he had not in fact conducted, has claimed to associates over the past year to have received “a large chunk of money” from the Pentagon for a study concerning radical Islam. I have since been told that Debat was preparing a study on Islamic warfare, and that his client, albeit indirectly, was Andrew Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, a kind of in-house think tank.

Here’s the story. On September 17, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Finn, a spokeswoman for the policy office, told me that the Defense Department did not have a direct contract with Debat, but “DOD does have a contract with the company [Debat] works for … I suggest you contact his employer for additional information.” The employer she referred me to was the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a think tank headed by defense analyst Andrew Krepinevich (Debat also, until last week, had a relationship with the Nixon Center, a think tank that describes itself as “America’s realist voice”).

Krepinevich told Mother Jones that he had hired Debat as a consultant in April 2007 to provide analytical support overseeing a contract from the Pentagon Office of Net Assessment, but that he was in the process of severing it; he later sent me an email saying that the “relationship has been terminated, effective today.”

“We had a contract with the Pentagon to do some work,” he told me. “We hired Alexis to support us in that work. His sole arrangement with us was as a consultant.”

“We didn’t know the extent to which his background was misrepresented,” Krepinevich added. “Once we identified and confirmed it, like others, we severed it.”

Krepinevich did confirm that the contract in question was from the Pentagon Office of Net Assessment, but would not reveal the exact topic. Two other sources who had heard of the contract told me it concerned a study of Islamic warfare.

Krepinevich’s online bio indicates that he formerly worked in the Pentagon Office of Net Assessment. He has also written an account of the Army’s failures in Vietnam. CSBA “gets a significant percentage of our revenue from government and also foundations,” he said.

“One of the concerns you might have is that he was somehow influencing U.S. policy,” Krepinevich said. “We were fortunate in a sense that in this circumstance, it was discovered before things proceeded very far. The reports he provided to us don’t exist.”

“I feel badly,” Krepinevich added. “This was a person at the Nixon Center. He did work at ABC.” At the time, he said, he felt that, “If they vetted him, I don’t need to worry so much.”

“One thing: the Nixon center, ABC, CSBA—we are all in the information business,” Krepinevich added. “We are in the business of looking at what’s going on in the world and adding some value to that. In the information business, if the information is blatantly wrong, I can’t count on the credibility of it.”

Krepinevich also expressed concern about Debat’s wellbeing, a point raised by other associates and sources. Some suggested that Debat might move to the Middle East; others that he should take his story to Hollywood.

I asked Krepinevich what the moral of the story might be. He thought about it, and responded: “We live in the information age, in a time when people’s demand for instant and insightful and incisive analysis of issues is at all time high. And you have this voracious competition between various news services, on the air 24 hours a day, seven days a week, competing who can break the story first. … And the person who in a sense says I have the special access, I can provide tremendous value added—the temptation is to buy the sizzle before you inspect the steak.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate