How the Pacific Fleet Was Corrupted
Notes on "Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy," by Craig Whitlock
I’ve had a bit of deja vu this week, reading this book while Pope Francis was in New Guinea and Singapore. The northern side of New Guinea is where my grandfather did the geology work for which he is best known, on uplifted coral reefs, and I know many of the places in this book. It takes place between the closing of Subic Bay on Luzon—important because it’s huge, and the Navy had to shift around assets—more or less up to the present, with Fat Leonard awaiting his sentencing. I lived on two of the Japanese bases mentioned in the book when I was a child, and a few of the Naval officers caught up in the scandal were colleagues of my parents, though we had moved stateside before events here really took off. As of 2022, Subic Bay is reopening.
This is a marvelously detailed book, thanks largely to the disclosure of investigative files to the author, covering one of the worst corruption scandals in the history of the U.S. Navy. A bunch went to prison, but the marquee case was overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct—among other things, the cops didn’t actually try to get one of the key hookers to testify. In no case is a Naval officer accused of paying for one, but the arrangement that Leonard would pay for them seems fairly obvious.
This is an ongoing thing. At the center of it is the larger-than-life figure of Leonard Glenn Francis. Many others have remarked on how lurid a character he is, but to give you an idea, his idea of a party trick is crunching wine glasses in his mouth. You could say the scene of his corpulent body reclined on a table at a top-floor Southeast Asian restaurant is reminiscent of a Roman orgy, but that would evoke too many pleasant paintings involving fruit—in this case the prostitute is feeding him greasy leftovers. There is a scene, in Manila of course, in which a replica of Douglas MacArthur’s corncob pipe is used as a sex toy.
We are told Fat Leonard is Malaysian, which is to say he is a Malaysian national born in Penang, not Malay (they tend to be kind of little). He’s half-Scottish and half-Indian, with a bad relationship with his father, and pretended to have attended UNC Chapel Hill. His mother raised him Catholic then moved to England. What Fat Leonard managed to do, starting with his first U.S. Navy contracts in the early 1990s, was lock up most of the their husbanding business throughout Southeast Asia, and some in Korea and Japan, with a near-monopoly for some time after muscling out competitors in Thailand and elsewhere.
As the criminal investigation nears its conclusion there are real concerns that making the busts will leave the Seventh Fleet—the forward-deployed Pacific fleet—in an unacceptable condition, in terms of both personnel and supply. The NCIS’s two informants are instructed to draw up plans for replacing Glenn Defense as a husbanding contractor, but keep them secret. There are a handful of more serious security risks in the intelligence compromises Francis’s network made, but the main leaks relevant to Francis’s business are of schedules of port calls, which allowed him to save a lot of money and have a major edge on his competitors.
The worst leak in the book occurs in 2012, in which Captain David Haas and Commander Mike Misiewicz, stationed at Yokosuka, meet Francis at the Tokyo Ritz and slip him details about the Navy’s ballistic missile defense operations in the Pacific. This has nothing to do with Francis’s business and it’s very strange.
It’s tempting to paint this as a particularly exaggerated case of graft, and Whitlock sticks to a fairly by-the-book muckraking style. You could also probably make the case that much of what happened here is a result of the strategic neglect of the Pacific in favor of fighting wars for Israel’s foreign policy goals in the Middle East after 9/11. Whitlock connects some of what occurs to a culture of entitlement during War on Terror, officers being used to being deferred to and treated in various ways, which is no doubt true, but there’s also a real sense in which nobody seems to know what they’re even in the Pacific to do. The case of Captain Jeffrey Breslau is an interesting instance of what’s actually a fairly common confusion of roles, being paid on the side as a public affairs “consultant” to a defense contractor—Whitlock calls him Francis’s ghostwriter—while actually serving as the Pacific Fleet’s chief public affairs officer.
Between 1997, when Francis receives his first husbanding contract for an aircraft carrier, the USS Independence in Port Klang (this could be worth millions of dollars), and shortly after the USS Cole bombing in 2000, his business really takes off. It’s on that port call that Francis meets the supply officer who went to work for him and eventually became his nemesis, Jim Maus. Whitlock describes how the Cole bombing gave Francis an opportunity for his most ridiculous boondoggle. A reluctance to make port calls in Muslim countries posed risks to his business, so he invented a contraption of pontoons and steel wire, called it the “Ring of Steel,” and even though Wackenhut told the Navy it didn’t really work, since it was being billed to Pacific Fleet headquarters in Honolulu, the COs continued to allow Francis to charge more or less whatever he wanted for it.
One detail that’s a little sketchy is just how much Glenn Defense defrauded the taxpayer for. It was certainly in the tens of millions of dollars, but sources quoted suspect it may have been much higher.
To give you a sense of just how deep the investigation had to go, two Directors of Naval Intelligence, officers in the post from 2011 to 2016, had connections to Francis. Vice Admiral Ted Branch even had his security clearance pulled, though he, rather absurdly, remained in the role with no access to classified information. Hundreds of personnel were investigated over the scandal, and Francis personally provided evidence against 240. The scandal saw the first admiral convicted of a felony in the history of the U.S. Navy—Robert Gilbeau, whose paperwork on his Purple Heart is also fishy. The Bravo Zulu letters to Francis from admirals are used to great effect by Whitlock, and he also became friendly with many of their wives, sending them on shopping trips and throwing lavish dinners.
The scandal implicated Admiral Michael Miller, in command of the Ronald Reagan’s strike group, and caught up with him while he was superintendent of the Naval Academy. It was Admiral Gary Roughead, now a fellow at the Hoover Institution, who invited Francis to a change-of-command ceremony in Annapolis. The skipper of the Reagan during its 2006 deployment, Terry Kraft, was forced to retire in 2015. The crazy thing about this is a lot of them got promoted after it happened, five of Francis’s dinner guests in Hong Kong that year made admiral, and one, Michael Gilday, became Chief of Naval Operations.
Francis had a key mole within the NCIS, John Beliveau, which helped him keep tabs on the investigation into him, and in the early going he was even an asset of theirs. Whitlock makes the good point that NCIS resources had been rededicated to terrorism, along with the resources of everything else, after 9/11. The problem is, redirecting resources for a task the NCIS is not well suited to is a waste of time, and it does seem to have left the Navy vulnerable to fraud and corruption.
Once the investigators started pressing, a few notable DC figures were brought in for the defense, among them the dodgy whistleblower lawyer Mark Zaid, who Breslau connects Francis to, and former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who represented Admiral Mike Miller. According to Whitlock, Freeh also lobbied the Navy’s disciplinary authority to let Miller off the hook. Given Freeh’s other corruption issues, that raises some questions.
The operation to begin making arrests is run by the NCIS in consultation with Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and with the permission of the ambassador in Singapore. It had to be done this way because the Chief of Naval Operations at the time was a former Seventh Fleet commander whose security detail was run by Francis’s NCIS mole.
When Beliveau is arrested at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, he is initially told he’s going to be visiting Fort Meade, which is probably a bit of a wink that the NSA was watching.
This is a fine book, it’s great actually, but I’d like to point out a few things from my marginalia.
One of Francis’s bribery targets, a contracting officer in Singapore who helped him take over the Thai business, went to work for the Justice Department in 2007.
Some of his early husbanding contracts before meeting the supply officer of the USS Blue Ridge, the Seventh Fleet’s flagship, are with the British. His mother is living in England for much of his life, and reappears near the end while Francis is in home confinement. Some of his early gifts are Royal Selangor pewter, a company with big British connections. One ship he bought for his company’s use came from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, and he crewed it with British-trained Gurkhas. The most interesting one is Edmund Aruffo, one of Fat Leonard’s top accomplices, goes to business school at Cambridge and then works for Barclays Bank, before going back to work for him.
Some of his staff at Glenn Defense were former Malaysian, Thai, Philippine and Indonesian admirals. Especially in the case of Malaysia, given the ongoing corruption issues there during this time, given that some of his events took place under the overt sponsorship of the Malaysian Navy, this raises some questions. While Francis is in prison he reaches out to the biographer of Jho Low, another Malaysian embezzler.
The approach on Michael Brooks in 2006, a naval attaché in a diplomatic post in Manila, happens very quickly. They have lunch, then he starts leaking, and later arranges diplomatic immunity for Francis’s vessels. This isn’t normal elicitation.
His Singapore mansion was the former Embassy of Saudi Arabia. When was it decommissioned and how was that sale arranged?
The means for leaking documents are occasionally interesting. Some are normal, like the use of drafts on Gmail, but some are more exotic. The first site, which officers thought was unmonitored, was cooltoad.com, an Indian site.
There are a handful of Israeli angles, at one point in 2007 or 2008 Francis threatens to use an Uzi on someone, which is an Israeli gun. In the later stages of the conspiracy Francis is communicating with his associates on the Viber app, which was developed by Israelis and the Japanese put some money into.
In the chapter on 2012, Whitlock reports that Glenn Defense’s IT manager is a golf partner with a defense attaché at the Chinese embassy in Singapore.
Though there are a couple of blonde hookers in Asia we can’t be sure about, the two definite Russian issues—the Russians are heavily involved in Malaysia—concern a 2010 drinking party in Vladivostok. Two of the officers consorting with Russian prostitutes are moved up the chain, one to captain, and the other to an appointment at the Naval Academy.
Francis’s brief escape in 2022 was costlier than it may seem. He was traded for Alex Saab, a drug money launderer close to the Maduro government.
That this is an era-defining mess is obvious, how to move forward is unclear, especially with U.S. strategic priorities in flux due to the election and conflict in Israel. I should also hope the Navy is looking at the Pavel Durov arrest and at least considering the risks of some of these communications platforms.