R. James Woolsey, a lawyer and arms control negotiator who had a brief, embattled tenure as director of central intelligence under President Bill Clinton and whose rightward political drift later led him to support the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and Donald J. Trump’s presidential candidacy, died on Tuesday at his home in Washington. He was 84.
The cause was a stroke, his wife, Conchita Sarnoff Woolsey, said.
An Oklahoma-born conservative Democrat with impeccable academic credentials — Stanford, Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Yale Law School — Mr. Woolsey had the background and intellect to carry him to increasingly prestigious positions over a long career in Washington.
The phrase “Defense Democrat” seemed to have been coined for him. He was a high-powered Washington lawyer but was known for public service under both political parties, including a stint as under secretary of the Navy during President Jimmy Carter’s term and work on arms control for the Reagan administration. From 1989 to 1991, under President George H.W. Bush, Mr. Woolsey was America’s ambassador to talks on a treaty limiting conventional forces in Europe.
In 1993, President Clinton delivered what should have been a career-defining assignment, naming Mr. Woolsey director of central intelligence, but the two never built a close rapport.
At the time, it seemed that a president without deep foreign policy or national security experience had chosen a director of central intelligence whose hawkish credentials would go a long way toward satisfying Republicans. Mr. Woolsey was also expected to help mollify career national security professionals entering an uncertain post-Cold War world — and facing post-Cold War budget cuts.
But while some presidents cherish having the C.I.A. director whispering secrets in their ear, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Woolsey rarely had private time together. They met biweekly, but only as part of larger National Security Council sessions. When a drunk pilot died after his small, propeller-driven airplane crashed on the South Lawn of the White House in 1994, Mr. Woolsey was said to have joked that it was him, trying to see Mr. Clinton.
His rocky tenure at the C.I.A. covered challenging times, including the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993; a terrorist shooting that year near the agency’s entrance that killed two people and wounded three; and the so-called peace dividend that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, a period that saw veteran Kremlinologists retiring or reassigned, effectively blinding the U.S. to the rise of a hostile Russia under Vladimir V. Putin.
And, of course, there was the 1994 arrest of the C.I.A. case officer Aldrich Ames, a turncoat who had delivered invaluable secrets to Moscow for nine years and is regularly described as the most damaging double agent in American history. Though there had long been evidence of catastrophic leaks at the agency, an intensive investigation into Mr. Ames only began in 1993.
Although Mr. Woolsey, after the arrest, called it a “systemic failure” that Mr. Ames had not been pinpointed sooner, he decided that nobody at the agency would be dismissed or demoted, opting to send letters of reprimand to 11 former and current C.I.A. officials whom he believed had overlooked early signs of the mole.
None of his tenure’s challenges could be blamed directly or fully on Mr. Woolsey, but the accumulation of so many significant problems — combined with his lack of backing from the White House and his failure to establish a productive working relationship with Congress — left him little support across official Washington.
Mr. Woolsey resigned in late December 1994. John Deutch was confirmed as his successor.
Woolsey was embittered by the experience of resigning under pressure. “He was obsessed by it,” James Risen, a former New York Times reporter and the co-author of “The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the C.I.A.’s Final Showdown with the K.G.B,” said in an interview.
“It made him much more conservative over time,” Mr. Risen added. “His bitterness led him to be anti-Clinton. And then that led him to become more Republican in the late ’90s. And then Iraq brought him completely into the Bush, Cheney, neocon orbit, and he became a real pro-Iraq War hawk.”
Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Mr. Woolsey told the public television program “Frontline”: “I don’t know how many pieces of evidence one needs in the case of someone like Saddam Hussein. We know Saddam is working hard on weapons of mass destruction.”
He added that various defectors had reported that Mr. Hussein, the Iraqi leader, had “put a lot of time and effort in on biological weapons programs, as well as ballistic missile programs and nuclear programs. We know that he guarded more jealously than anything the details of his biological weapons programs.”
That assessment turned out to be wholly wrong, but was widely shared across the Bush administration, which ordered the invasion of Iraq only to find that Mr. Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. The war ended up lasting nearly nine years, with more than 4,000 U.S. deaths and more than 100,000 Iraqi casualties amid a grinding insurgency.
Like others who supported the invasion, Mr. Woolsey came to acknowledge the failure of intelligence that had pointed to a robust program for weapons of mass destruction under the Hussein regime. But, like so many others, he continued to maintain that the invasion was justified to oust a dictator and give Iraqis a chance at democracy.
In 2016, Mr. Woolsey joined Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign as a senior adviser, and he slammed the Obama administration and the tenure of its secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump’s opponent. After Mr. Trump won, Mr. Woolsey was said to be under consideration for a national security post, but nothing came of it.
His support for Mr. Trump was driven by the candidate’s advocacy for growing the defense budget and harsh critique of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. (Once in office, Mr. Trump withdrew from the agreement.)
Robert James Woolsey Jr., an only child, was born in Tulsa, Okla., on Sept. 21, 1941. His father was a lawyer, and his mother, Clyde (Kirby) Woolsey, managed the home.
He received a bachelor’s degree from Stanford in 1963 and a master’s in 1965 from Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes scholar. At Yale Law School, he was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps but was also involved in protests against the Vietnam War. After graduating in 1968, he spent two years in the Army and rose to the rank of captain, serving as a program analyst for the secretary of defense and the National Security Council, and as an adviser to the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in Helsinki and Vienna.
Following his service, he spent three years as general counsel to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Starting in 1983, he did a three-year tour as delegate at large to the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks with the Soviet Union.
He was a partner at the Washington law firm Shea & Gardner for 22 years. He also served as a vice president in the global strategic security division at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.
His first marriage, to Suzanne Haley, ended in divorce after 48 years in 2013. The next year, he married Nancye Miller, who died of cancer in 2019.
Besides his third wife, a human rights activist he married in 2020, he is survived by three sons from his first marriage, Robert, Daniel and Benjamin; two stepchildren, Cristina and Nicholas Sarnoff; and 10 grandchildren.
Outside of his government and legal work, Mr. Woolsey was active in policy institutes, including the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Profiles of Mr. Woolsey noted that his early transition from antiwar activist to staunch ally of defense hawks set the tenor for his career. In 1969, he met Paul Nitze, a respected and powerful arms control expert who was then deputy secretary of defense. At their first meeting, in the midst of a party, they had a furious argument about the Vietnam War.
Mr. Woolsey later recalled being worried about having offended the elder statesman. But a few months later, a colleague asked if he wanted to travel to Europe to serve as an aide to Mr. Nitze in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Mr. Woolsey said he would love to, but that his brief time with Mr. Nitze hadn’t gone well.
“Well,” the colleague said, “that must be what he meant.”
Mr. Woolsey said, “What do you mean?”
The colleague answered: “Well, I floated your name up to him and he paused for a second and then he kind of grinned and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine, send Woolsey on up. He may not know what the hell he’s talking about, but at least he’ll speak up.’”
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