Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy
Craig Whitlock. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024. 459 pp. Notes. Index. $25.
Reviewed by Stephen Wrage and Doyle Hodges
We are told that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it. But few people or institutions have the honor, courage, and commitment to reflect publicly on their most shameful and painful failures and to learn from them.
Since the Vietnam War, the U.S. military has proven itself a brilliant learning organization. It has studied the record, learned from its errors, and emerged a stronger fighting force. The Fat Leonard story seems to be an exception. Fortunately for those of us who love the Navy, Washington Post investigative reporter Craig Whitlock has written a thorough, dispassionate, and excruciating account of the institutional, moral, and professional shortcomings involved in the Glenn Defense Marine Asia scandal.
Even now, 11 years after Fat Leonard was arrested, one still hears people who should know better dismiss the scandal he caused as a huge fuss over a few admirals accepting some lavish meals. As this well-documented book makes clear, that is not what it was.
The Fat Leonard scandal was all of the following:
• It was a smarmy, devious high-school dropout from Malaysia getting officers from ensigns to admirals to compromise themselves in return for parties, dinners, prostitutes, and Cuban cigars.
• It was carrier strike groups being rerouted to ports controlled by Fat Leonard where they would be overcharged for services that were never delivered.
• It was U.S. Navy officers leaking military secrets.
• It was a senior NCIS official blocking or undermining 27 investigations of Fat Leonard’s criminal operations.
• It was the Seventh Fleet being bilked out of $40 million taxpayer dollars.
Anyone connected with the Navy must know by now that Fat Leonard was Leonard Glenn Francis, owner of Glenn Defense Marine Asia, a ship husbandry business that grew to provide 90 percent of the services the Navy required from Australia to Korea.
The Seventh Fleet ought to have been a hardened target for a sleazy operator such as Francis. Its officers are well-trained, patriotic professionals who are acutely aware that they hold positions of special trust and confidence. Nonetheless, Francis found he could depend on many officers to sign bills they knew were inflated, to accept large gifts they knew were prohibited, or attend dinners that cost more than $1,000 a head and then to pretend they were square afterward if they wrote him a check for $50.
It is painful to read the emails, saved by Francis, in which officers specify the make and model of camera they want him to buy them and the stores they want him to take their wives to shop.
The highest ranking officers of the fleet allowed the Braveheart, Francis’s privately owned vessel, to tie up next to the USS Blue Ridge (LCC-19), flagship of the Seventh Fleet, and attended parties at which limousines of sex workers arrived and were then paraded across the decks of the two ships—in front of enlisted service members—to entertain at parties for the top brass.
This is all known based on the records Francis kept, which included secretly taken photographs documenting the sexual preferences of Navy officers. The United States is lucky that Leonard Francis was content with comparatively low-level graft. The Chinese would have made worse use of the photographs, emails, texts, and brothel receipts he collected.
Has the Navy learned from this history? Fat Leonard’s imitators have already emerged. In Malta, Frank Rafaracci, 70, CEO of Multinational Logistics Services, recently went to prison for bribing a Navy official. In Seoul, David Kim, 49, pleaded guilty to bribing officials with cash, alcohol, prostitutes, and vacation travel.
There are lessons for the Navy here, and Whitlock, who has been nominated three times for a Pulitzer Prize, has marshaled the evidence for those ready to learn them. As persons who love the Navy and have devoted decades to developing naval officers, we found it painful to read such an unsparing account of pervasive institutional failure, but the book is strong medicine that the Navy needs to take.
Dr. Wrage is a professor in the Political Science Department at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Dr. Hodges is the Dean of Academics at the U.S. Naval War College. He is a retired Navy officer who commanded a destroyer and a forward-deployed salvage ship and has taught at the U.S. Naval Academy, the Naval War College, Princeton, and George Mason University.
New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West
David E. Sanger with Mary K. Brooks. New York: Crown, 2024. 450 pp. Index. Notes. $33.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander Michael Axel, U.S. Navy
The post–Cold War period of U.S. unipolarity in the 1990s and early 2000s was shorter than many in the West expected (or hoped). The economic and military rise of China, alongside the resurgence of an increasingly belligerent Russia, has resulted in the reevaluation of long-held aspirations of a U.S.-led liberal world order. Suddenly, decades of U.S. strategic and foreign policy decision-making are under critical scrutiny, as the global order shows itself to be increasingly fractured and disordered.
Veteran New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize recipient David Sanger, alongside researcher Mary Brooks, charts the winding road to the current U.S. geopolitical quagmire in this beefy exposition of recent history, a surprisingly fast and easy read considering its metaphorical and literal heft. The majority of the events recounted in this book are recent enough for many Proceedings readers to have either read Sanger’s Times articles on the Cold War as they broke or participated in the events directly. Sanger and Brooks endeavor to answer the critical question of how the three subject nations got themselves to this point.
Framed as equal parts contemporaneous account, retrospective, and strategic evaluation, the book does not shy away from confronting successes or errors in judgment by civilian leaders, the intelligence apparatus, or the military; failures of statecraft, Sanger argues, are as much attributable to U.S. actions as to Russia and China’s. His exhaustively sourced retellings of critical events in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere lend weight and credibility to his evaluation of both how the world arrived at this moment and why. Sanger’s decades of experience as a journalist, and Brooks’ expertise as a researcher, shine through in carefully crafted interplay between sourced dialogue, exposition, and historical background. There are chapters dealing with economic brinkmanship, military successes and failures, and diplomatic intrigue that emphasize just how complex the current state of affairs truly is.
There are, of course, many more players in this new Cold War, and far more interdependent complexity than in the West-versus-East clarity of the previous Cold War. All three nations continue to use hard and soft power in their political, economic, and military spheres of influence to exert advantage over each other, but, new to this era, none have been able to completely isolate itself from the others, in no small part because of the technological and economic advances that have enabled modern society. Sanger touches on this newly interdependent reality at multiple points throughout the book, a device to remind readers that the past is not necessarily prologue for this new multipolar norm.
The past, however, looms prominently in the background. The long histories of U.S. relations with both Russia and China, as well as their relations with each other, are tightly woven into each chapter (which generally alternates between some U.S. interaction with either Russia and China), providing the necessary background to help put the strategy and decision-making by both sides in the proper context. Avid readers of history will surely appreciate the refreshers, and those just starting out will find themselves with plenty of tempting offramps for further reading.
The body of literature on today’s multipolar challenges continues to grow, and as tensions rise in both Eastern Europe and the western Pacific, with no apparent resolution in sight, it is critical that strategists, policy experts, and military operators are versed in the political and historical drivers behind these events. New Cold Wars provides an excellent primer on how we got here, even as the question of where we go next remains largely unanswered.
Lieutenant Commander Axel is a naval flight officer. He is currently an international studies Ph.D. student at Old Dominion University, concentrating on civil-military relations and U.S. foreign policy.
