Reply #158: Trireme Partners LP

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Trireme Partners LP is a limited partnership venture capital company that invests in technology, goods, and services related to homeland security and defense.

Company chairman is Richard N. Perle while Henry Kissingeris a member of its advisory board. Trireme Partners LP was registered in Delaware in November 2001, two months after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Boeing is one of the investors in Trireme.<1>

The name "Trireme" is taken from a Greek warship with three banks of rowers.

Trireme also has Hollinger's Conrad Black on the board of directors, and was set up by Perle's Defense Policy Board pal Gerald Hillman (CDT, Cambridge Display Technologies), which Hollinger also invested highly in. <2>

An early version of the a similar company with the same players called Argo Century was circulated as a prospectus to investors, It was incorporated in Delaware prior to the September 11th attacks. It was renamed Trireme and retooled to focus more on homeland security after the attacks.

Asked about Hersh's article when appearing on CNN, Perle defended his dual roles. "I don't believe that a company would gain from a war. On the contrary, I believe that the successful removal of Saddam Hussein, and I've said this over and over again, will diminish the threat of terrorism. And what he's talking about is investments in homeland defense, which I think are vital and are necessary," he said. <3>

Perele then went on to the attact. "Look, Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly," he said. "A terrorist?," CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked. "Because he's widely irresponsible ... Because he sets out to do damage and he will do it by whatever innuendo, whatever distortion he can -- look, he hasn't written a serious piece since My ai", he said.

<http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Trireme_Partners_LP>

more on Trireme
<http://www.warstories.cc/organization/?organizationId=8017>

more on Trireme by Seymour Hersh Issue of 2003-03-17 New Yorker

LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN

At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.

Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

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<http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030317fa_fact>