Bruce Riedel

Bruce Riedel is Director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution.   He retired in 2006 after 30 years service at the Central Intelligence Agency including postings overseas. He was a senior advisor on South Asia and the Middle East to the last four Presidents of the United States in the staff of the National Security Council at the White House. He was also Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Near East and South Asia at the Pentagon and a senior advisor at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels.  He was a member of President Bill Clinton’s peace process team and negotiated at Camp David and other Arab-Israeli summits and he organized Clinton’s trip to India in 2000. In January 2009 President Barack Obama asked him to chair a review of American policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan the results of which the President announced in a speech on March 27, 2009. In 2011 he served as an expert advisor to the prosecution of al Qaeda terrorist Omar Farooq Abdulmutallab in Detroit.  In December 2011 Prime Minister David Cameron asked him to brief the United Kingdom’s National Security Council in London on Pakistan. He is the author of The Search for al Qaeda:  Its Leadership, Ideology and Future and Deadly Embrace:  Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad (translated into Persian). He is a contributor to Which Path to Persia:  Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran, The Arab Awakening and Becoming Enemies:  U.S.-Iran Relations and the Iran-Iraq War, 1979-1988.  His latest book is Avoiding Armageddon:  America, India and Pakistan to the Brink and Back.  He teaches at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies.  He is a graduate of Brown (BA), Harvard (MA) and the Royal College of Defense Studies in London.  Bruce is a recipient of the Intelligence Medal of Merit and the Distinguished Intelligence Career Medal.