The Hawk

Stern and officious, Jim Woolsey comes across like the hard-core hawk he is -- a former director of the CIA with access to high-level officials in the White House and the Pentagon. But going against the grain of old-school conservatism, he has become the loudest voice in a growing chorus of "cheap hawks" who want to wage the war on terror with plug-in cars and fuel made from manure. A member of the Defense Policy Board, Woolsey wants to defeat terrorism by freeing America from its dependency on foreign oil, rather than routing the enemy with costly wars. "America's energy demand is financing terror," Woolsey says. "We don't need pie-in-the-sky hydrogen scenarios that are twenty years out. We don't have that kind of time."

Among the techno-fixes Woolsey promotes: producing ethanol from prairie grass and corncobs, harvesting biodiesel from farm waste and adding a battery to existing hybrid cars. "Plug-in hybrids could get up to 150 miles per gallon," he says. "And since electricity is comparatively cheap, you would get the functional equivalent of fifty-cent-a-gallon gasoline."

Woolsey's primary goal is to bolster America's national security. But his energy-independence strategy would also curb global warming, create a market for clean-energy providers, strengthen the dollar, cut the deficit and generate international good will. "It's not just win-win," he says. "It's win-win-win-win-win."

Woolsey, 64, is careful not to criticize his fellow conservatives, and the White House has begun to borrow his ideas about energy efficiency. "Conservatives dismiss renewable energy as kind of airy-fairy -- you know, real men dig and drill," says Reid Detchon, executive director of the Energy Future Coalition. "Woolsey has used his security-hawk clout to cut through that myth and pump up the profile of clean-tech solutions."

An Oklahoma native, Woolsey earned degrees from Stanford, Oxford and Yale. For a hawk, he can be a bit of a prankster; he sings backup in a rock band called the Goths and played the role of Homeland Security Secretary in a war-game scenario prepared for Congress that envisioned terrorist attacks disrupting oil supplies. An avid kayaker who lives in a solar-powered house off Chesapeake Bay, he also confesses to being "a tree-hugger" -- but he isn't worried about sharing an agenda with environmentalists. "It doesn't matter what the principal motivation is," he says. "It's just two different sets of reasons for wanting the same thing."

Next: The Emissary: Sheila Watt-Cloutier

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