When Wolfowitz unilaterally canceled loans in Cambodia, the Congo Republic, India, Kenya and other countries on corruption grounds, the executive board rejected his proposals

Sunday, May 20, 2007 - Page updated at 02:02 AM

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Wolfowitz, World Bank just didn't fit
By Karen DeYoung

The Washington Post

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NICK WASS / AP

Paul Wolfowitz's troubles at the World Bank went beyond his girlfriend
to encompass his travel and perceived self-promotion, his distance
from the staff and his unilateral decision-making.


WASHINGTON - As he prepared to assume the World Bank presidency in
spring 2005, Paul Wolfowitz reached out to the bank's skeptical senior
managers. In informal meetings, he took copious notes and asked
respectful questions.

He knew they had doubts about him, Wolfowitz said, not least because
of his role in designing the Iraq war. But he told them he was
committed to the bank's goal of reducing world poverty, that he would
learn from them and rely on their guidance.

According to several attendees, they were won over by his humility. "I
went back and reported to my staff that I didn't see any horns," one
senior official recalled. "He was personable, charming, intelligent
and said all the right things. None of which he lived up to."

Thursday, two years later, Wolfowitz resigned from the World Bank,
effective June 30. He had become a virtual pariah, forced out by the
bank's executive board for ethics violations and reviled by much of
the staff as an arrogant intellectual who cared more about his ideas
and image than about the institution or its customers.

Some do not think he deserved this. The Wall Street Journal editorial
page has said craven European governments opposed Wolfowitz's efforts
to cleanse a corrupt and hidebound institution. Many in the Bush
administration consider his ouster unfair payback-by-proxy for the
Iraq war.

But others, including some friends and admirers, saw the seeds of
Wolfowitz's demise in the arc of his 34-year Washington career: a
steady rise through the State Department and the Pentagon, interrupted
only to become dean of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced
International Studies during the Clinton years.

The World Bank


The World Bank is not a bank in the conventional sense. The bank, with
185 member nations, was created in 1945 to rebuild Europe after World
War II. It provides more than $20 billion a year for projects such as
building dams and roads, bolstering education and fighting disease.
The bank's centerpiece program offers interest-free loans to the
poorest countries.

Seattle Times news services
Throughout, Wolfowitz built a reputation as a foreign-policy
iconoclast, a mild-mannered intellectual with a steely ideological
core, and an inept manager.

Wolfowitz, they concluded, should never have been in charge of a
multinational institution owned by more than 180 governments and with
10,000 employees.

"At the World Bank, you're not as well-protected" as in government,
said Fred Ikle, a veteran national-security official who brought
Wolfowitz to the State Department in 1973. "You don't have somebody
above you who will endorse what you want to do."

Another former colleague who served with Wolfowitz in four
administrations said "the kinds of problems he got into were
predictable for anybody who really knew Paul." Speaking on the
condition of anonymity, the source voiced admiration for his intellect
but said Wolfowitz "couldn't run a two-car funeral."

The immediate cause of Wolfowitz's resignation was a pay deal he
ordered for Shaha Riza, a bank employee with whom he was romantically
involved. But the public vitriol that poured from the bank once his
fall began in late March with revelations about the deal underscored
wider problems.

Far from respecting the bank, member governments and staff members
charged, Wolfowitz surrounded himself with doctrinaire former White
House and Republican officials and gave them wide authority. He
altered long-standing policies and imposed new ones without consulting
the staff or member governments. He risked the bank's credibility and
the future of the poor countries it serves.

A turning point came last month, when Wolfowitz's hand-picked managing
director, New Zealander Graeme Wheeler, told him he should resign for
the good of the institution.

In a signed letter to the Financial Times, more than 36 former top
bank officials described his signature anti-corruption initiative as
"implemented with no consultation, and little transparency or apparent
consistency." Employees wore blue ribbons supporting "good
governance," a signal they wanted Wolfowitz to go.

The final proof of Wolfowitz's estrangement from the bank came when he
hired a famously aggressive lawyer to fight for his job and warned
that if he were fired, the bank's reputation would fall along with his
own.

"All you need to know about how little he gets it is in that move,"
said one prominent Washingtonian with long experience in multinational
institutions. "The bank is a black hole of indolence and bureaucracy.
It moves slowly. But it has some of the best people in the world....
They have been thoroughly humiliated, disdained and insulted" under
Wolfowitz, he said.

The board, in a report released Monday, seemed to agree. The "central
theme" of Wolfowitz's tenure, it said, was that he had "cast himself
in opposition to the established rules of the institution."

Reputation as skeptic

Wolfowitz built an early reputation in Washington as a skeptic of
perceived national-security wisdom. Recruited from the Yale University
faculty to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the
Nixon administration, he criticized détente with the Soviet Union.

In 1976, he was among a group of Ford administration officials who
questioned whether the CIA was underestimating the Soviet threat.
Under CIA Director George H.W. Bush, he played a leading role in what
was known as a "Team B" analysis, judging that the Soviets were
amassing military superiority under the cover of arms control.

"The B team demonstrated that it was possible to construct a sharply
different view of Soviet motivation from the consensus view of the
analysts," Wolfowitz told author James Mann, whose book "Rise of the
Vulcans" recounted the history of the current administration's
national-security team.

Early in the Carter administration, Wolfowitz took a midlevel job in
the Pentagon, where he produced the first extended study of the need
to defend the Persian Gulf. An attack threatening U.S. oil supplies,
regional stability and Israel, he concluded, could come from the
Soviets or from "the region," in particular, Iraq.

During the Reagan administration, Mann concluded, Wolfowitz "developed
into the leading conservative foreign-policy thinker of his
generation." As head of policy planning in the State Department, he
also recruited like-minded analysts - including future George W. Bush
administration colleagues I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Zalmay
Khalilzad - and added China to the list of untrustworthy partners.

Wolfowitz crossed swords with Reagan's first secretary of state,
Alexander Haig, who reportedly considered him too "theoretical" and
planned to fire him. But George Shultz, Haig's successor, promoted
Wolfowitz to assistant secretary, though he apparently shared some of
Haig's concerns. "Paul, this is an administrative job," Shultz warned
Wolfowitz, according to Mann. "It's not just thinking."

Later, Wolfowitz thrived as Defense Secretary *** Cheney's chief
policy strategist during the administration of President George H.W.
Bush.

The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance he wrote said the United States
must be prepared to "shape the future security environment" by
anticipating threats and to protect its interests "with only limited
additional help, or even alone, if necessary."

During the 1991 Persian Gulf war against Iraq, Wolfowitz failed to
persuade the White House to go beyond driving Saddam Hussein's forces
out of Kuwait. Concerned about the reaction of U.S. allies and public
and congressional opinion, the elder Bush rejected Wolfowitz's call to
defend Shiite southern Iraq as an enclave where Saddam's overthrow
could be planned.

At Johns Hopkins during the Clinton administration, Wolfowitz
expounded his views on Iraq in articles, speeches and congressional
testimony.

Judging him as an administrator, "professors felt he did a very good
job at fundraising and enticing big names onto the faculty," according
to one faculty member, but he was "remote and mostly gone." Wolfowitz
concentrated on molding a new foreign-policy paradigm for a future
Republican White House.

In mid-1999, he joined the George W. Bush campaign team, for which he
was one of two top foreign-policy advisers, along with Condoleezza
Rice. After Bush's election, Rice was tapped as the president's
national-security adviser.

Wolfowitz wanted to return to the State Department, but Bush's
secretary of state, Colin Powell, turned him down. They weren't
"ideologically in sync," Powell later said.

Eventually, Wolfowitz returned to the Pentagon as deputy to Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld planned to run the department with
a strong hand, leaving Wolfowitz free to think. With the Sept. 11,
2001, terrorist attacks as indirect justification, Wolfowitz built the
strategic rationale for invading Iraq.

Resistance to change

"Everyone who has been appointed president of the World Bank knew
almost nothing about the bank, its business and its operations," said
Moises Naim, the former executive director of the bank who is editor
of Foreign Policy magazine.

As member governments grumbled about their displeasure at Wolfowitz's
appointment by Bush, bureaucratic expectations were perhaps lower than
usual. Wolfowitz's outreach was encouraging, but it came with signs
that became part of the indictment of his leadership.

Beyond the dispute over Riza, Wolfowitz's girlfriend, the negative
stories about Wolfowitz flowing from the bank focus on his travel and
perceived self-promotion, his distance from the staff and his
unilateral decision-making.

Everyone agreed with Wolfowitz's emphasis on stopping corruption in
the governments that received World Bank loans. But when Wolfowitz
unilaterally canceled loans in Cambodia, the Congo Republic, India,
Kenya and other countries on corruption grounds, the executive board
ordered him to come up with a coherent policy and then rejected his
proposals.

Although he indicated that he planned to limit his travel, Wolfowitz
spent much time on the road. One senior bank official expressed horror
at Wolfowitz's suggestion, when logistics for an Africa trip seemed
troublesome, that he would simply hop on a U.S. Defense Department
plane.

"Several of us said: 'Uh, we don't think so. Actually, this is an
international institution,' " the official recalled. "It was a kind of
odd blindness that took people aback."

Many staff members expressed outrage at the news-media entourage
Wolfowitz brought along on his travels with the apparent purpose of
displaying him on the institutional Web site. Kevin Kellems, who
joined Wolfowitz at the bank by way of Vice President Cheney's office,
managed his public persona.

Kellems' unpopularity with bank employees and managers, however, paled
beside that of Robin Cleveland, a former White House Office of
Management and Budget national-security official brought in by
Wolfowitz as a "senior counselor." He delegated much of his managerial
authority to her. It was Cleveland - with no international experience
and a demeanor widely considered abrasive - who met with senior staff
on behalf of Wolfowitz.

In his statement to the bank board on the Riza deal earlier this
month, Wolfowitz seemed to recognize that "what this is really about"
is "my leadership and management style." He said "there are some
significant things that I need to change in order to regain the trust
of the staff." He had "relied too long on advisers who came in with me
from the outside."

Wolfowitz acknowledged the need for "more direct and frequent
engagement with staff on substance," he said, adding, "I truly believe
I can do much better."

Post staff writers Rick Atkinson, Walter Pincus and Thomas E. Ricks
and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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