Will a British divorcee cost ‘Wolfie’ his job?
The appointment of George Bush’s leading hawk as head of the World Bank was heading for a crisis over his relationship with a senior British employee.
Influential members of staff at the international organisation have complained to its board that Paul Wolfowitz, a married father of three, is so besotted with Oxford-educated Shaha Riza he cannot be impartial.
Extraordinarily, they claim she played a key role in pushing the 61-year-old Pentagon official into the Iraq War. And the row comes amid claims that Wolfowitz’s wife Clare once warned George Bush of the threat to national security any infidelity by her husband could cause.
A British citizen – at 51, eight years younger than Wolfowitz’s wife – Ms Riza grew up in Saudi Arabia and was passionately committed to democratising the Middle East when she allegedly began to date Wolfowitz.
She studied at the London School of Economics in the Seventies before taking a master’s degree at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, where she met her future husband, Turkish Cypriot Bulent Ali Riza, from whom she is now divorced.
After they moved to America, Shaha worked for the Iraq Foundation, set up by expatriates to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War. She subsequently joined the National Endowment for Democracy, created by President Ronald Reagan to promote American ideals.
Bulent Riza said Shaha started to “talk to Paul” about reforming the Middle East. And New Yorker magazine’s respected commentator Paul Boyer observed that a senior World Bank official “named Shaha Ali Riza” was an “influence”.
