The Role of Diplomacy in Combating Terrorism

June 29, 2017 THE INTER-UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TERRORISM STUDIES

“The Role of Diplomacy in Combating Terrorism”

Opening Remarks: General Alfred Gray, USMC (Ret.) Twenty-Ninth Commandant of the United States Marine Corps; Senior Fellow and Chairman of the Board of Regents, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies

Moderator: Professor Yonah Alexander Director, Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies and Senior Fellow, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies

Panel: Ambassador (Ret.) Charles A. Ray Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs and ambassador to Cambodia and Zimbabwe. Previously, he served in the United States Army for twenty years

Ambassador (Ret.) Jo Ellen Powell Former career member of the United States Foreign Service who served as Consul General in Frankfurt, Germany and ambassador to

Disclaimer The authors, editors, and the research staff cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in this publication. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions associated with this report. Copyright © 2017 by the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies Directed by Professor Yonah Alexander. All rights reserved. No part of this report may be reproduced, stored, or distributed without the prior written consent of the copyright holder. Please contact the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, 901 North Stuart Street, Suite 200, Arlington, VA 22203 Tel. 703-562-4513, 703-525-0770 ext. 237 Fax 703-525-0299 [email protected] www.potomacinstitute.org www.terrorismelectronicjournal.org www.iucts.org

Ambassador (Ret.) Charles Ray Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs and ambassador to Cambodia and Zimbabwe. Previously, he served in the United States Army for twenty years

As Dr. Yonah Alexander has said, we have lived with terrorism and extremist violence for many decades now. As I was thinking about what I wanted to say to you, I did what he did, and went to Google and a few other search engines and I looked at terrorist incidents over the years. I actually went all the way back to, for example, some of the first bombings of our embassy in Saigon in the sixties and seventies when the VC used truck bombs to attack the American embassy there. What I concluded is that, while the incidents themselves, regardless of the number of physical casualties they generated, were local, it was, and still is, the intent of the organizations who carry out such actions that they have a much broader impact. And in fact, most of these incidents, even some of the smaller ones – let us for a minute forget about 9/11 and the horrific number of casualties – but even incidents generating a small number of casualties, such as the disabled American who was killed when an Italian cruise liner was highjacked in the Mediterranean, have an international effect and impact. And this is what I think extremist groups seek. Not so much the specific casualties, but the fallout from them; the fear and uncertainty that is generated when these events take place and they are not responded to in a way that makes people comfortable. It erodes the confidence people have in their governments.

So, given that terrorism and extremism aims to affect us internationally, it goes without saying that in order to be successful in combating terrorism, we have to have international cooperative structures in place to identify these organizations, to identify their leadership and their aims; to be able to cut off funding and supplies and support to them; and to be able to stem the flow of new recruits. We also have to recognize that most terrorist activity, most extremist activity, starts with an idea, it starts in someone’s head. While a military response is sometimes necessary – and as someone who wore a military uniform for 20 years I am a firm believer in appropriate military responses to these acts – you cannot defeat an idea with tanks and guns. I know there are a few people, a few of my former colleagues in uniform, who do not like hearing this, but there is no military on earth powerful enough to defeat an idea. You can kill the people who hold that idea but unless you can stop them from getting new recruits, you have to keep killing until you run out of bullets and you will still have a war on your hands, because killing the believers doesn’t kill the idea. So, what is needed is some way to understand the idea or ideas behind these extremist movements, and then develop an appropriate mix of ways to deal with it, and that is where diplomacy comes in.

During my time in the army I remember a saying “know your enemy,” which fits with something that my grandmother and my uncle taught me; “keep your friends close and hug your enemies like a python.” Diplomacy is how we keep our friends close so that we can build the structures we need to provide mutual benefit and protection, but it is also a way that we can keep track of our adversaries. There are very few countries on the planet that we do not have some form of diplomatic relations with. Contrary to the image the popular media gives you of diplomats, we do not spend all of our time going to cocktail receptions and playing tennis with the prime minister. I can tell you that the diplomats at our embassy in Moscow are not having a good time. Despite what you might here in some quarters, the Russians are not our friends. And because of that, it is very important that we have someone close enough to be able to keep a finger in the wind to know which way it is blowing. If you have an adversary who you do not talk to, who you only encounter during times of conflict, you have an adversary who is going to kidney punch you in the dark. So that is also where diplomacy is important.

Even when employing the military, it is also critical to have diplomatic support. I do not know how many of you have seen this new TV show, it is a couple of years old now, “Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders,” which I had to stop watching because it is so unreal. It is about an FBI unit that jets all over the world whenever an American gets into trouble, and they basically zip in and shoot the place up and get the bad guys and they get our people home safely. The FBI does have international response units – I have worked with them – but they do not have the carte blanche authority that these guys exercise on TV. And by the way, our embassies are not in some of the places they show them to be in their movies. I think it threw me off when they had the embassy in Belize in some resort town and had the ambassador meeting them on the tarmac when they landed. I was an ambassador twice and I did not go out to the airport to meet FBI teams, that is what you have an RSO [Regional Security Officer] or a Legat for. But the point I want to make is this: even when you are employing military or law enforcement assets as a response to a terrorist act, there is a diplomatic component. It seldom gets advertised. It certainly does not make it into the movies. In the movies, the guys put their parachutes on, they lock and load, they get on a plane and they jump out the other end, they shoot up the bad guys and go home. What is left out is the fact that someone has to get flight and landing clearances for them. Someone has to get overflight permission for every sovereign country whose airspace that aircraft intrudes upon. Unless we are declaring war on a country, we do not land military forces in that country to do anything without permission from the political leadership and relevant authorities. The military is not authorized, equipped or trained to get such permission; by law and custom that is a diplomatic function.

So, you see, even when you use the military, you need to have some diplomacy to enable the military to do its job successfully. And who do you think by the way, when a military team goes in on a counterterrorism response and does its job and gets on a plane and flies back to wherever they are based, who do you think cleans up the mess? And they inevitably leave a mess. Because that’s the nature of military operations; to shoot people and blow things up. An example, and I’m not quite talking terrorism here, but, non-combatant evacuations. When a country is going to hell in a hand basket and the military comes in at State Department request and under State Department jurisdiction and evacuates American citizens they will usually use neighboring countries, provided that the circumstances in those countries are stable enough, as staging bases to get Americans out. to get them on commercial aircraft and back to the U.S. and when they do that successfully, they go home. And I can tell you that, having been involved in a few of these in my 30 years in the Department of State, there is usually about a six- to eight-month cleanup required after they leave. They break things, they ruffle feathers, they do what the military is trained to do. It’s not intentional, it’s just the nature of a mission-oriented organization. I had a helicopter unit commander on an evacuation in west Africa once who wanted to let his pilots have a little strafing training along the coast of the country where I served as deputy chief of mission—during that particular mission, the ambassador was absent, and I was charge d’affaires, and was consequently, the senior American official present. The air unit commander reckoned that since they were just waiting for the cargo helicopters to bring in the evacuees; they did not need the gunships, so rather than have his guys sit around idle, he thought it might be a good idea to let them fly around and shoot up the coast line to get some practice. What he failed to take into account, or perhaps he just was not aware, is that the country in question was involved in a civil war with rebel forces in the interior, and had just had its first democratic election. The image of American gunships conducting live fire along the coast was something neither the US nor the country needed at that point in time. But, that is what the military is trained to do and without a seasoned diplomat on the scene to tell that commander not just no, but hell no, I hate to think what might have happened.

I could go on and on but the point I am making is that in order to effectively deal with and combat terrorist activity, much as we do in regular military operations abroad in situations short of outright warfare, for the military aspect of it you need diplomacy before the operation to create the conditions and get the permissions; you need diplomacy during to make sure that not only rules of engagement are adhered to, but that no actions are taken that could exacerbate the political situation. You do not have a diplomat on the team when they are breaking in to a building to rescue hostages, but you had better have one at the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to see that all of the necessary prior coordination is done; and you definitely need one after to clean up the aftermath of any military action.

You need diplomacy to create the cooperative agreements internationally to identify and track terrorist organizations, to understand their motivations, to try and if not stop at least stem their recruiting, and to shortcut their funding and other logistic support. That, I would hope, gives you food for thought for your questions and comments, and is why I think, contrary to what might seem logical I think diplomacy is probably, not necessarily the only on,e but one of the most potent tools in our toolbox for combating violent extremism and terrorism if only we are wise enough to use it appropriately in a timely manner. Thank you.

Ambassador (Ret.) Jo Ellen Powell Former career member of the United States Foreign Service who served as Consul General in Frankfurt, Germany and ambassador to Mauritania

I would like to build a little bit on what Ambassador Charlie Ray has been talking about and take this discussion to some personal observations about diplomacy and the functions of diplomacy and the practice of diplomacy in managing conflict, including terrorism, transnational terrorism, and violent extremism.

The first experience I would like to draw on was from serving in Beirut, . I was there from June of 1983 until September of 1984 – bookmarked by the first bombing that blew up our embassy and the second bombing that blew up our embassy again. That was a very different situation and a very different environment with very different drivers and motivators of those who were attacking us than was the case a few years later when I was an ambassador in Mauritania.

In the first instance you have to consider the context: Lebanon had been in for many years a state of civil war. The United States was invited to send military presence to Beirut after the summer of 1982 to help secure first of all, the departure of the PLO forces from Beirut to their new home in Tunis, and second, to help secure, stabilize the situation on the ground. The invasion of Lebanon by Israel had further destabilized that civil war and I think one of the real game changers in that conflict was the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila Refugee Camp, primarily carried out by the Christian militias who were combatants in the civil war. And it was a diplomat, it was the head of the Embassy political section, a gentleman named Ryan Crocker, who was the first one to go in after those massacres and to report on what he saw there.

As the civil war continued, the United States became increasingly perceived by some factions in Lebanon as having taken sides. I do not think we did, but that was the perception. And the result was first, our embassy blown up on April 18, 1983 with, I do not know, 60 or 70 casualties, including 17 or 18 Americans, followed by the attack on the Marine Corps headquarters out at Beirut airport, which I think is still one of the largest non-nuclear explosions that we ever recorded, with more than 240 casualties. It blew me out of bed at 6:00 o’clock in the morning and I was several miles away. And then our embassy was blown up again in September of 1984. In those cases, those who would do us ill, the terrorists, were still fairly conventional, if I may say, in terms of sponsorship, ideology, organization, affiliation. We know that Iran was and remains an active supporter, funder, and recruiter for Hizballah, which broke away from the more “mainstream,” Amal movement, in Lebanon’s civil war. And that was an environment that was fairly straightforward – I hate to say it – but fairly straightforward to navigate. We understood pretty well who the bad guys were; we understood why they were motived to do what they were doing; we understood where the funding was coming from; we knew a lot about them.

In Mauritania in 2010 to 2013, the situation on the ground was very different. No, there was no active civil war, but AQIM moved freely across very porous borders. They controlled a lot of the landscape because nobody else did. So, AQIM, which had no real state backing, this is not state-sponsored terrorism in quite the same way that Hizballah is state sponsored. But AQIM had and has its own agenda, not necessarily a single ideology, not necessarily a single party line, multiple sources of funding and support, and really taking advantage of the fact that there is very little in that North African Sahel landscape to inhibit their movement, their activities, their recruiting. In fact, most of the AQIM recruits are, I think, less motivated by ideology than they are by lack of other opportunity.

As Ambassador Ray has said, diplomacy and we, the diplomatic mission in a foreign country, have a responsibility to analyze, to understand, to support, to work with our military contacts, to work with our host government to try to address the drivers of terrorism. What makes a recruit recruitable? How can we change that course? How can we make it difficult for AQIM to move across national boundaries that are weakly guarded or not guarded at all? How do we instill in the population of the country some notion that AQIM is not their friend either --maybe not ours, but not theirs either? How do we build local police and military capacity? How do we build local civil capacity? How do we support efforts that will give disenfranchised youth opportunities to do something other than engage in petty criminality or the occasional kidnap for large ransoms?

There are as many kinds of terrorism as you can imagine, as many ideologies, as many drivers. We cannot treat it monolithically. We have to understand what it is about this specific group or what it is about this specific organization. And I think being a diplomat, being on the ground in the environment, understanding the environment is a key to understanding and developing an appropriate response. I think that as diplomats we have some immensely powerful tools at our disposal to do that. The ambassador is the president’s personal representative to whatever country the ambassador is accredited to. The ambassador leads a country team that may include, as Ambassador Ray alluded, many government agencies, including the FBI, the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, the intelligence community, the Defense Department. The ambassador controls this rich pool of resources to draw on, and incredible talent and knowledge and experiences and expertise, to analyze the why, the drivers, and to develop the appropriate, if not solutions, responses. Whether that is inhibiting recruitment, cutting supply lines, creating an inhospitable environment for terrorists to operate in. Just making the ground harder to operate in can be incredibly effective.

Another tool that we have at our disposal, and the most important I think, probably the single most effective, is our own men and women. The people who go out there, who establish contacts, who meet with people across a spectrum of backgrounds and activities, and who get to know, who engage, who participate in programs, who reach out to people.

In Mauritania we worked with a local filmmaker to sponsor a series of film classes, and we invited young Mauritanians to make films about things that were important to them. Nobody told them what to make films about, but some of their short films were very revealing in telling us what motivated young Mauritanians to go to an extreme, to be attracted to an extremist organization. Education is one of the areas we can do more, should do more, and I hope we will do more. Exchange programs – the experience of being somewhere, of being in a different culture, of learning and experiencing something first hand, are one of our best diplomatic tools to try to address the ideologies that drive terrorism, the despair and economic disenfranchisement that particularly affect young people; the mythologies that people like ISIS leader al-Baghdadi use to attract recruits; and to make the ground, the environment, inhospitable. There are all some of the things that we, as diplomats, do.

And we have to adapt because, as I started out, the situation in Lebanon was nothing like the situation in Mauritania a few years later, and yet, we were confronting, combatting terrorism and violent extremism in both countries. Very different ways, very different scenarios, very different circumstance. So, these are some of the things we can do as diplomats. We need that presence, we need that understanding. We need to know what drives and why. We need to know how the supply lines work, where the money for military intervention. Believe me, in Mauritania, the Africa Command was a frequent and welcome visitor because they had resources to train, to equip, to help us build civil capacity in a country that had very little in the way of civil society or national identity.

I think I will stop there. I hope that has given you a few things to think about.

Q&A Session

Question from Professor Alexander: If I may take the liberty as moderator to ask both of you questions.

How do you respond to the historical record? I always look at history to see if we can learn anything. Going back to the 18th century Frederick the Great famously mentioned that diplomacy without force is like music without instruments and talking about realism. And then of course we know what many of the other leaders thought about diplomacy. For example, Teddy Roosevelt basically had the same concept and approach that you need the military in order to beef up the diplomatic. And then of course we come to the idealism approach of Woodrow Wilson the 14 points – that he said that the peace agreements, the processes obviously have to be open and the public has to be aware of what is going on so. In other words you have historically the two approaches of realism and idealism. And then most recently, President Trump developed at least in his foreign trip an ecumenical diplomatic move when he went to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Rome in terms of the role of religion.

So my question to both of you how do you see the role of diplomacy? And then of course you mentioned the experience in Lebanon in the early 1980s and perhaps the General would like to deal with that particular aspect. So in terms of those who are members of the diplomatic community and mission but military people – the marines, the army, the airmen and so on – they were also obviously the victims of terrorism. So again, this is the question – in terms of the different perceptions of diplomacy and obviously we do have the record open in terms of what scholars and leaders and professionals you know thought about it. What is your view?

Ambassador Ray: I am going to take advantage of my advanced age and answer first. I guess in response to that I would start with, “diplomacy without force is like music without instruments.” Force without diplomacy is like gang violence. My feeling on that is that there is a tendency to get too far out on either wing of all diplomacy or all force when in fact neither works alone. I think Wilson’s Fourteen Points of “Peace in our Times” was probably naïve in the extreme. But the idea that we can achieve all of our aims by force alone is equally foolish, because unless your aim is to go into a country, completely occupy it, and enslave its occupants, there has to be some mechanism to deal with the people in that country after the shooting stops. Unless you plan for the shooting to never stop.

I would give an example of how diplomacy is important in ways that are sometimes not appreciated. When I went to Cambodia in 2002, one segment of the Cambodian population that I think at the time – and I am not saying this to brag because, I mean, it just is – the Cham of Cambodia, which is a very small group; they are roughly 10-12 percent of the population and probably 80 percent of the Cham are Muslim, the rest are animists or Buddhists. And I think I might have been the only person in the Department of State at the time who was aware that the Cham were Muslims, and I knew that because I had worked with them during my tours in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, I was part of the planning group that caused the destruction of many of their villages when we backed the South Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

No one back here in Washington seemed to be aware of this population – the fact that it was Muslim. A particularly benign form of that religion, what I call Muslim with a Buddhist bent. At the time I arrived in 2002, we had no aid programs in our embassy targeted at this group, and our aid program was quite large. Very few of the staff of my embassy were even aware of their existence. When we started talking to the Cham, we discovered that the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) group out of Indonesia, as surrogates of the Saudi Wahhabi, were in fact sending imams into Cambodia, into Cham villages, and they were hell bent on radicalizing the Cham population. It had succeeded in some villages to the point where some of the Cham who had been easy-going, as I said sort of Buddhist Muslims, had built separate mosques. Those who were following JI would not go to mosques with the others. They were literally breaking these villages apart, segmenting these villages into radical and non-radicals, which was troubling because this is in the wake of 9/11 and we were doing Muslim outreach programs all over the world. We did not have one in Cambodia because no one back here knew that there was a Muslim population to reach out to. And those of you who have ever had to work in government organizations know that once it gets underway, getting it changed is like changing the direction of an aircraft carrier. You can spin that wheel all you want to but you will have had two cups of coffee before the bow starts to move.

We managed though, finally, to finesse it. We had a congressman in California who was very much interested in education, who had come out to Cambodia and I had gotten him a ride on an elephant and he was just absolutely tickled pink. He went back to Washington and put two million dollars in the State Department budget earmarked for the Embassy in Cambodia for educational programs. I am not saying it was the elephant alone that did it – he saw a need for it. We were able, after some intense negotiations with USAID, to get about $75,000 of that two million carved out, which I put into programs specifically for young Cham students, providing English language training and college prep training to try and pull them up on a par with the Khmer students in applying for scholarships to foreign schools. I went to several ceremonies in Cham villages; I was an honored guest for 3,000 Cham who gathered on a soccer field in the blazing sun for several hours to welcome me to a fishing village one day.

I did not really think a lot of it until about 11 or 12 months later a French anthropologist who had been studying the Cham for some university in came to the embassy wanting to know what the hell we had done to screw up her study. She had been studying these people for a few years; and, in an attitudinal study which had them ranking various countries, and, for the longest time the U.S. had about a 12 percent approval rating among the Cham. It had nothing to do with religion; it had to do with the fact that they remembered who had bombed their villages back in the 1970s. And they also were aware that we were giving lots of money to a lot of organizations in Cambodia for a lot of things and none of it was trickling down to them. So, this $75,000 scholarship program, which to me seemed like just the basic minimum, was welcomed in the community – and they are a very tight knit community. This anthropologist informed us that in a period of about four months her statistics had done this giant flop from 12 percent approval to something like 83-84 percent approval, because suddenly they realized, that, well, the Americans had discovered them and cared about their situation after all. And that we were giving them something they sorely needed; which, by the way, put a big monkey wrench into Jemaah Islamiyah’s radicalization program. Now, this was not our intent, because at that point we really did not know about it. I tell this to say it is sometimes the smallest things that can have the greatest impact.

If you are looking at things in terms of black and white, it is either use the military or use diplomacy, you are usually going to be wrong. You have to look at the specific situation and then tailor the response, the package, the program, the team to that situation, to that village, to that community or neighborhood, at that time. And the only people who are in a position to be able to do that effectively are the people who are there, day in and day out, dealing with these people; our diplomats. And not just our State Department diplomats. My, what I call my outreach response team in Cambodia, consisted of my defense attaché, the head of my military support unit, what do you call it, office of military cooperation, my PAO, and the number two in the CDC – I had a Center for Disease Control unit in my embassy, working on the AIDS problem. I did not have my political guy on it, I did not have my consular guy, I had my admin guy on it to provide support – that was my response team under my direct control. And we did things that caused a few eyebrows to lift back here in Washington, but they were effective. There was a Jemaah Islamiyah 8-month mission surveilling the American and British embassies in Phnom Penh, which we found out after a riot and that our program, without it being the intention to do so, threw a monkey wrench in their plans to blow us up. That mission failed because they could not get a Cham Muslim to volunteer to help them get the explosives and get them put in the right place.

So, you know, and I make that point because it is not a one-size-fits all. It is not a do-it-this-way or do-it-that-way situation. It is, and again the argument for the diplomatic participation, it is that your response to a situation must fit that situation. And it must fit that situation at that time. What I did with the Cham in 2003 probably would not work today. Consider this; I gave them something when they had been getting absolutely nothing. Now that they have gotten something, try giving them that puny package and they would probably laugh you out of their villages. So, you need people on the ground aware of the circumstances and in contact with not just the people but also the environment to work these programs effectively.

And now, I guess my response to that is you know Wilson’s diplomacy-only approach, and who was that guy Frederick the Great or Teddy Roosevelt’s “hit ‘em with your big stick,” it might give you a certain amount of pleasure to do that, but ultimately it is just going to screw things up worse. Sorry, that is not a politically correct answer. I do not believe in being extreme. In Buddhism, you hear talk about “finding the middle path, the middle way,” and while that sounds philosophical, the fact is that in diplomacy quite often the most successful way is somewhere approaching the middle. You are balancing factors. Unlike a military operation that is “go out, do your mission, complete your mission, go home;” in diplomacy, we never get to go home, because our mission is never done.

Ambassador Powell: A quick comment on that. You know there is a lot of debate about soft power and hard power and the truth is it takes both. They are complementary and any president executing foreign policy, any secretary of state, secretary of defense executing and developing foreign policy recognizes that.

A small example in Mauritania, I mentioned that AFRICOM was a frequent visitor and one of my best friends. One of AFRCOM’s functions was to train the Mauritanian military, train and equip. We trained Mauritanian soldiers and we sold Mauritania airplanes because they have a vast, vast territory that is very thinly populated. But another thing that the US military did for us was deploy humanitarian assistance teams. They sent in veterinarians to work with local herders to treat livestock, to have healthier herds, more new births, more milk, more food. I cannot tell you how important that was to helping make the population a little more stable and a little more food secure. So hard and soft power work together and it is not so neatly divided that diplomacy is only “soft” power. I would say that diplomacy is very hard work indeed, and by the same token, the military is not exclusively “hard” power. It can be both and it takes both and they complement each other.

Question from the audience: Professor Alexander, thank you very much. General Gray, Ambassador Ray, and Ambassador Powell, thank you for your service. One of the things that is obvious is that as problem-solvers in the military and diplomatic service you have to deal with paradox. So, Ambassador Ray, when you spoke about the insertion of Wahhabist ideology into Cambodia, what were the correspondences within the State Department in terms of how we might constructively engage the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in terms of communicating the complexity and the problems that they were causing for international security in terms of supporting such extreme ideology?

Ambassador Ray: I am not sure how familiar you are with the State Department and how it is structured but picture the Balkan States. The bureau in the State Department that deals with Saudi Arabia and the bureau in the State Department that deals with East Asia and Cambodia, although they are roughly on the same floor are about as far apart in day to day coordination as these regions of the world are physically separated on the ground. So, while as an ambassador it was actually easier for me to communicate with the Department of Defense than it was to communicate with the Assistant Secretary for – what is it called? NEA? I spent 30 years at the State Department and I am not even sure what their acronym stands for.

The East Asia Bureau was of course made aware of our findings and the cables reporting them are in the State Department’s great databank of reporting cables, properly tagged and identified. Whether or not anyone who deals directly with the Saudis ever read, thought about, or responded to or reacted to those cables in any way, I was never made aware of such and of course my communications with those people in the department, in the East Asia Pacific Bureau, were confined to what we were doing and could do on the ground with our interlocutors. Which is sort of a long answer to say I have not a clue if we have ever talked to the Saudis about this – my guess would be just from reading the newspapers and knowing the dynamics of the U.S.-Saudi relationship that we really have not.

Let us go back even farther than that to 1993, I was Deputy Chief of Mission in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is a country that is about 60 percent Muslim, about 39 percent Christian, and then about 1 percent who knows. Again, like the Cham in Cambodia, Sierra Leonean Muslims are pretty easygoing. The Saudis were funding Egyptian imams to reach out to the Sierra Leonean Muslim communities; this was because the Saudi imams would not go into Sierra Leonean villages just because of the culture. This is in the 1990s and you would have the market ladies going to work wearing just skirts and that just scandalized the Saudis. But I do not know, if we ever engaged Saudis on this type of behavior? I doubt it. I certainly did not. Then I was answering to the Africa bureau. Did the Africa bureau communicate with the bureau covering the Middle East? I do not know. I doubt it. So, it is not so much of a paradox as it is just a bureaucratic reality that within the Department of State people – up until the time I retired in 2012, I cannot say that is true now – but people tended to pretty much concern themselves almost exclusively with their small patch. It is difficult enough to get programs going that involve groups of embassies within the same bureau.

Audience member continues [inaudible]

Ambassador Ray: Yes, we have silos, and yeah, big time in the Department of State. The silos there are…

Audience member continues: So, was there an effort to integrate operations?

Ambassador Ray: Over the years, a number of times we have had the buzzwords “regionalization” and encouraging ambassadors to reach out to their embassies in their region. The problem is that it is never really backed up with resources. In a bureaucracy, that which gets rewarded gets done. We have not had many ambassadors that I know who were promoted or given an award for creating a regional program at the embassy. Yeah some do it, and there is a half-hearted effort but I never saw a real solid effort to get regional programs going. The closest I ever came to it was when I was ambassador to Zimbabwe, we had the Friends of Zimbabwe, which was the EU, U.S., Japan embassies and aid programs which would get together twice a year and discuss how bad things were in Zimbabwe and why we could not make them better.

Question from the audience: I am Norman Cigar here from the Potomac Institute. In the assumed shrinkage of the State Department both in terms of material resources and perhaps even roles, how does one compensate for that and what is the impact, first of all on counterterrorism and how does one compensate for that dynamic?

Ambassador Powell: Well, yours is a timely question because the reorganization and examination of what are the core functions of the Department of State are very much the topic of the moment in the State Department today. I just finished an assignment as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Resources so I have been talking reorganization all the time for the last six months. The Secretary and his leadership team have not yet finished their analysis of what the reorganization exactly is going to look like. I think we who have been a part of this dialogue are very focused on maintaining our core presence, our core missions overseas because that is the pointy end of our spear.

As far as programs like counterterrorism go, as you know a 30 percent cut to the State Department’s budget in 2018 is going to have a significant impact on program activities. Programs are important in any ambassador’s toolkit. They are useful, they are important but they are not the critical element. The critical element of the Department of State is people. I think that whatever shape a reorganization takes and whatever the result is in terms of the size and structure of the workforce, I am pretty confident that our missions overseas and our core functions overseas are going to remain as robustly staffed as we can manage. It is much, much easier to shut down a program and start it back up a few years later than it is to cut off a pipeline of staff, of officers, of foreign-service professionals. If you cut that off and try to start it two or three years later, you have left yourself a hole that will take many, many years to repair. These are decisions that I know the Secretary and his leadership team are studying closely now and I wish them luck because it is not going to be easy.

Question from the audience: Hi, I am Milton Hoenig. I have two items. One, it seems to me that any attempt at diplomacy would have completely interfered with our attack on Usama bin Laden and his killing in . Anything that would have informed that Pakistanis about that beforehand would have been, you know would have completely aborted the entire activity. Second point is, you know before we go to war with Iran, maybe it is time to reopen our embassy there. We have not been there since 1979. Maybe it should have been a point in the JCPOA final item. Anyway, is that a worthwhile thing to consider, reopening our embassy in Tehran?

Ambassador Ray: I would go to your first one, I totally agree. I mean, I do not think any diplomat with his head on straight would suggest that we, on the eve of launching an operation against Usama bin Laden that the diplomats go in and inform the Pakistanis in advance. As I said, each situation is different, there is no template. Okay, we are going to go after bin Laden and first you have got to do this – no, that check list is going to be different for every operation. And so in that kind of an operation you probably do not inform the host government.

However, I will say this, if you have created the right diplomatic environment, and again, you see, you are looking at it from a military standpoint – what do we do for this particular operation. In diplomacy, it is, what do we do to create the environment so these types of operations can be conducted appropriately when they come up and that is where diplomacy fits. If we have the right diplomatic relationship with the Pakistanis, then the process of planning and executing that operation is less fraught with unknowns and uncertainty. And, of course, the aftermath, when we do have to go in after liftoff is less traumatic; then when we go in and say, oh, by the way, here is what we just did. We have some countries where we can do that and we can do it successfully, but then we have others where we can’t.

Yeah, on having an embassy in Iran. My secretary in Cambodia was one of the hostages in Iran, she became my secretary in 2002, and was still traumatized by that experience. But a very bright, very thoughtful person whose point was, from her perspective as the secretary to the deputy chief of mission in that embassy, during that time, proper diplomacy before the embassy takeover could probably have, if not prevented it, at least mitigated some of the way it was done. And that to let that incident, long after the fact, prevent us from somehow establishing effective contacts, if not with certain players in the Iranian government, but at least the Iranian people made no sense. So, I guess my sense is, again going back to what I said earlier, keep your friends close, but when it comes to your enemies be a python. If we want to be able to have any impact on what the Iranians do in that region and in the world, we need to be close enough to them to know what that is in time, and diplomatic relations is how you do that. If you only had diplomatic relations with the people that you liked all the time, then we could cut the State Department 30 percent, because we would not have a whole lot of embassies. Whether we could do it right now under current circumstances, a political reality, probably not because of the process needed to do it. Whether it is a good idea to think about, it is like Cuba. We were not talking to Cuba long past the time when it made any sense not to talk to them, it was almost like, well we will not talk to them, so we will not talk to the people we do not like, you know. Does that make sense?

Ambassador Powell: If I could just add, establishing, reestablishing diplomatic relations and reestablishing an embassy in Tehran would first and foremost require the full cooperation and support of the Iranians. And I am not sure we have that. So this is not something that we can impose. We, I think, have under Secretary Kerry taken a pretty important step in reestablishing at least a conversation with the Iranians. That is a good first step and I think if we can continue to build on that in multilateral fora for example with third party support whether it is the Swiss or somebody else, then we should absolutely continue that discussion. I was last in Iran just a few years before the takeover. My father was posted there and he left in 1973, so I spent some time in Iran and I think that most Iranians probably would not be taking to the streets if we were to discuss with the Iranian government reestablishing relations and reopening an embassy; but we have got to get that support first and I do not think we are there yet either.

Ambassador Ray: I would also like to point out that it is not that we wake up one day and say we are going to have diplomatic relations with Iran and suddenly the newspapers are full out. I would point out that Vietnam and China, two countries that we currently have full diplomatic relations with, there was a long period where we talked about where we should go before we even went so far as taking the step of establishing a liaison office, which is the first step in establishing an embassy and full diplomatic relations. I think that is probably where we are with Iran. We are in the courtship phase, where we get to know each other, where we start to feel them out as to what their views are. Because I agree with what Ambassador Powell said, it is not that we wake up and we decide we want relations with Iran and we snap our fingers and we get it. We need to know what they want and what is in it for them, too.

This is again where diplomacy comes in. When I use the world diplomacy I do not necessarily mean formal diplomatic relations with embassies. Diplomacy is the process of communicating with others and establishing channels of communications to get mutually beneficial things done. It does not always require having this whole formal exchange of diplomatic papers, it requires having an exchange of ideas.

Question from Professor Alexander: Can I ask a political question? Who makes the decision on a particular approach? For example, we have now the Qatar crisis with Saudi Arabia and others. Is this the role of the State Department? Is it the role of the White House? Is it the combination? Is it the dialogue between State and the White House? Now in the news there are conflicting ideas coming from the White House and State Department and people are confused. Can you clarify?

Ambassador Powell: Not much clarification to what Ambassador Ray has noted. And I can confirm that there is a lot of confusion out there. You know, policy rarely resides in the hands of a single organization or entity. The Department of State has an important role in the formulation and execution of policy. But the NSC also has an important role in the formulation of policy, the Defense Department has a role, the intelligence community has a role, and the White House obviously is where it all comes together. Every president, not just this one, has relied on both formal advisors in the formal structures of government as well as more informal advisors. Every one of these functions is legitimate and defensible and the ultimate decision-maker is the president. I personally think that the debate is healthy. I think that it is to everyone’s benefit to hear as many points of views as possible before going forward but it is a process that is dynamic. Not every policy, not every decision is going to have the same inputs. It is going to change from one issue to another.

Ambassador Ray: I will throw a real soft apple into this and say it depends. It depends on the country and whether or not that country is of sufficient strategic importance to us that it gets continued high-level interest and it depends on the issue. There are some issues that will always be decided at no less than the Assistant Secretary, Deputy Secretary, or Secretary level. There are other issues that will always go to the NSC and be briefed to the President before they are decided. There are, however, other issues that are in effect policies that will actually in terms of what is done and how it is carried out will be decided even at level of ambassador. If it is of low strategic importance and no one here really cares about it, and you do it and no one sends you a blistering cable saying get on the next plane and come back, and oh bring all your household effects with you because you are fired, then you have made policy.

The ultimate responsibility and authority for foreign policy resides with the president. The actual sort of day-to-day policy guru is the Secretary of State, but the mandarins who carry it out are generally the Assistant Secretaries. That is the “senior policy level.” I was trying to think of an example – I will give you an example, and I go back to Cambodia because that was a laboratory of how to get your rear end chewed and still survive it. When we discovered that there had been this Jemaah Islamiyah activity aimed at the British and U.S. embassies, what we discovered at the same time was that because of a certain State Department reluctance to incur the wrath of some people in Congress who did not like the prime minister, they were restricting the programs and contacts that we could have with the Cambodian military and with the Cambodian police – who, by the way, were responsible for border security and internal security, who are the ones who would know about possible surveillance and other activities. But I was informed after my station chief came in and said, by the way here is an intercept I want you to read and I find out that these two guys had been drawing maps and planning where to put the bombs on both my embassy and the British embassy for eight months. Well, going to the State Department saying we have to change this policy, you have got to let me talk to the military because we are in danger not to was a non-starter because they had already decided that protecting the bigger budget was more important than running into a fight.

So, I did something that ambassadors are authorized to do but only do in extremes. I wrote a telegram from me directly to the Secretary of Defense. I let the Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary, and the Assistant Secretary know what I was doing and I outlined the problems and the vulnerabilities and I strongly suggested that he get on the phone and call the commander of Pacific Command and point out that they needed to have a more robust dialogue with the Cambodians to be able to provide effective counterterrorism support. I also talked to the commander of Pacific Command before I did this, so he was on board. Needless to say, there were people within the State bureaucracy who objected to this because this was changing a policy, or trying to effect a change in policy, without involving them. And I did not involve them because they did not really want to be involved.

Ultimately the policy was changed, because the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of State, and the Assistant Secretary for East Asia Pacific Affairs agreed with me over the bureaucracy. So, in effect, I made a policy, which was then endorsed; and that happens. In many ways large and small, on a day-to-day basis, people who really are not technically policy-makers will make policy by the actions they take, if those actions are not refuted. That is the reality of the policy-making sausage mill; you have certain policies that the president himself must sign off on, you have other policies where the Secretary of State must sign off on and you have other issues that can effect little policies, that as long as they do not gore anyone’s ox, they are done on the ground. And so that is how it is done. You can academically describe policy making in Washington, but it would take a six-week seminar to describe the reality of policymaking in this town. It really would.

Question from Professor Alexander: In the news recently, there is a report of the most senior diplomat in China who resigned after almost 30 years because he felt that the president’s policy on the Paris Agreement was completely wrong. He wrote an op-ed and was interviewed. The question is aside from the interagency relationship and input as you described it so well, within the State Department, if you are an ambassador or a foreign service official and you do not particularly policy, you mentioned in the extreme maybe, but can you say, you, president, are wrong and I am not prepared to serve under your command?

Ambassador Ray: You always have the option to resign. In fact, going back, when you join the Foreign Service you sign an agreement that you will be 1) available for worldwide assignment and 2) that you will faithfully carry out the policies made by those above you to the best of your ability. This is just government service or military service, for that matter, or at large, and I am sure General Gray will agree; if you cannot carry out an order that you are given, the only honorable thing to do is resign. This business of, “You are going to stay and you are going to fight the bastards from the inside,” that is the most dishonorable. You resign.

However, and this is something that I have been wrestling with for the last five years, I just did a book a few months ago, I just published a book and it is called Ethical Dilemmas and the Practice of Diplomacy, and in it I address this issue. What I feel is a real problem is not people acting unethically, not people breaking the law, breaking the rules; but, people not being equipped sufficiently to handle situations where values collide. Where my boss wants me to do something that conflicts with my personal value systems. Or where the demands of my job conflicts with my value system. Or as many of us have faced, where two different bureaus of my organization want me to do different things that cannot be done together but both are right, and what thought process or what decision-making process do I use to decide between the two. Or my organization asks me to do something, which is fine and it is legal to do it, but asks me to do it in a way that I feel is counterproductive. How do I engage with the system to get the job done but still preserve my integrity and my value systems?

The Department of State has a number of quote “core value announcements” that have come out over years and they teach ethics out at the Foreign Service Institute, although they teach compliance ethics which is “Do not do this, do not do that, you will go to jail if you do this.” What we do not have is a system – and the Army is starting and I am sure the other services are starting it too – that teaches people how to deal with ethical dilemmas, how to deal with collision or clash of values. I do not know if you have ever seen this, there is this test they do at some universities: You are standing on the side of a railroad and there are five workers down the track and there is a little junction here, and there is one worker over there, and the train is coming. And the workers cannot see the train and the train driver cannot see the workers, and you are standing near the switch, what do you do? Do you let the train hit the five workers or do you switch it onto the track and hit the one worker? It is a silly problem but it describes what we in government face on a daily basis. How do I decide between these two competing projects? What criteria do I use to rank them? If I am an ambassador in a country, and I was, and I have got an American in jail in a province on trumped up charges where the provincial governor just made an announcement saying he is going to do all these nasty things to NGOs at a time that we were really strong in supporting NGOs. Do I go to war with the governor over his statement on the NGOs or do I keep quiet and try to get the American out of jail? Both of them are the right things to do, but I cannot do both. Because if I go after the governor I am really putting that American in jeopardy and if I remain quiet I am basically sort of saying, Forget the NGOs we are not working on this. And a decision has to be made. This is one of those cases where the old bureaucratic saying, “If I do not do anything I will not get in trouble,” will not work. You have got to pick one or two of those, and we do not have a system to help people do that.

Ambassador Powell: I just would like to add to what Ambassador Ray has said, that the worst thing you can do is to subvert your leadership. So, ultimately, resignation may be the answer. But, I would like to think and I believe that ours is a culture that permits and encourages discussion and debate. And we do have, and it is sacrosanct in the Department of State and in the Foreign Service, something called the Dissent Channel, which is a mechanism for individuals, officers, at any rank and at any level to challenge a policy. The Dissent Channel is never used for administrative things, but it is used to challenge policy. If you are getting nowhere in your strong disagreement with a policy decision, the Dissent Channel is available and it is used and it is a protected communication. It is in the law.

Question from the audience: As you mentioned, working with NGOs and societies or organizations within countries really help us to learn more about what is going on in those countries. From my personal experience, we got a grant from the U.S. State Department in 2015 on a project, and the project was countering violent extremism for unraveling the propaganda and recruitment techniques of ISIS in Turkey. And basically the project that we conducted aimed to learn about the radicalization trends of Turkey to deal with it. Of course, we conveyed the results to the embassy and of course they conveyed that to the State Department. But there is another problem specifically for Turkey. There is an increasing anti-American sentiment. And unfortunately this sentiment is backed by the media, which is also backed by the government. My question is how can you create an alternative channel to reach out to the societies like Turkey? Because a couple of months ago, the percentage was like 83-87 percent anti-American sentiment. And it was not seen, I mean, this is unique. The second issue has to do with the Syrian conflict. And as the American involvement will increase in the coming days and months, do you see any potential risk in terms of the trend that you have experienced in Lebanon? The U.S. has been taking sides in the Syrian conflict for a long time but not that on the ground level. So, these are my questions.

Ambassador Powell: Two very hard questions. I think I could probably talk for hours on either subject. To answer the second question first: Is there risk? Absolutely. Absolutely. Diplomacy takes risks all the time. And risk avoidance should not be part of our policy. Risk mitigation should always be, but not risk avoidance. So, back to the comment I made about soft power being pretty hard nonetheless. It is true. Everything that we do, every hard problem that we try to solve, resolve, bring to a conclusion carries risk. Risk to our people, risk to our embassies, risk to embassies in other countries, perhaps even risk to populations here in the United States. But we have to assess risk, we have to understand what the challenges are, we have to make a decision what level of risk we are willing to live with. How tolerant are we going to be? And those judgments are going to vary from one situation to another. Is what we may decide to do in Syria risky? Of course. And I do not know what we are going to decide to do. But whatever we do decide to do, evaluation of risk and a discussion of how to mitigate it are going to be part of that discussion.

As far as the situation in Turkey, a little personal note. My son, I only have one child, and he did his junior year abroad at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul a couple of years ago and he is still studying Turkish and he is getting to be a pretty good Turkish speaker. So in our family we have all been watching what has been happening in Turkey because his presence there made it particularly interesting for all of us. And it is indeed unfortunate that anti-American sentiment seems to be on the rise, and how do we stay connected when there is a lot of noise about anti-Americanism and the public sentiment is perhaps changing or at least the official version is changing. I think in any society where media are controlled to some extent or another, in the absence of a truly free media, you just have to maintain those contacts on the ground at every level of civil society and keep that work going, and that is why diplomacy on the ground is so essential.

Managing the media is another challenge for diplomats. But in the absence of objective reporting and in the face of a growing anti-American sentiment that may be fueled in part by a government that disagrees with what we are doing in many ways for many reasons. I will not go into that, but I would say that at that point, the role of the diplomat and the contacts and the connections that the embassy and the diplomats have across the span of civil society becomes more important than ever. And you maintain the contacts with the universities, you maintain the contacts with the business community, you maintain the contacts with the media and the press and the government at every level that you can, and you just keep those relationships thriving.

Ambassador Ray: There is the other, and this is something that we are still in government I think really wrestling with, and that is maintaining a dialogue, if you will, or contact with the populations of these countries primarily though social media. Social media employment is something that the government came to late. The State Department, as it usually does, came to it even later than the rest of the government.

When I retired in 2012, it was still wrestling with what kind of social media policy should we have. But, and I will just give anecdotes of how I saw it employed and how I myself employed it, during that time in Zimbabwe you had a government-controlled media that was 80 percent propaganda unless it was the sports section. You had some “independent media” that was 95 percent irresponsible, and not a lot in between other than the rumor mill. And you had a government that was determined to control as much as it could the flow of information to the people, especially the young people. We could not rely on any of the media, in fact, to get the message out because as I said the government media spun everything for propaganda and the independent media just spun anything out of – you could not recognize things when they got through with it. To them truth was a three-letter word. So, we were faced with this problem of how do you not so much get rid of this incorrect narrative but how do you introduce an alternative narrative to the public for them to consider. You cannot control how people respond to the news they get. All you can do is try and provide them with the appropriate information.

We actually, out of desperation and because of the demographics, were forced to use social media. This is a country where not many people had access to computers, but everybody over the age of 14 had a mobile phone and most of those mobile phones connected to the Internet through satellites. So, you had kids out in the countryside far away from the nearest electrical outlet, but with their battery powered phone were on Facebook and on YouTube. We started doing live Facebook chats with Zimbabwean youngsters – they were coming off South African satellites so the government could not block the transmissions.

My public diplomacy section started accompanying me to all of my public appearances and live Tweeting excerpts from my public remarks so that the government could not spin them another way or the free press could not report them inaccurately because there it was on the Internet – I had 7,000 Zimbabweans following my Facebook page and I had the embassy Twitter account linked to my Facebook page so my Tweets were also appearing on my Facebook page. It made it more difficult for the propagandists and the government to spin a government slanted story and it forced the independent press to, at least when it came to us, clean up their act and report more accurately.

The other thing we did was, we were all over YouTube. When there would be an incident I had a videographer in my public affairs section who could do a videotape and do subtitles and music and had it uploaded within an hour of the end of an incident. This guy, I used to call him southern Africa’s Cecil B. DeMille, he was fantastic and still is. There would be a demonstration and the police would overreact, and we would have a Sizani Weza production with the pictures of a policeman whacking someone over the head with no drama, just straight reporting. “This date, in this place, this happened,” and there would be a little background music to make it nice for the kids to listen to. Needless to say, the government of Zimbabwe was happy when I left. The point I am making here though is that again it is using the tools of diplomacy to help frame the narrative. Diplomacy cannot catch a terrorist. Diplomacy could not kill Usama Bin Laden. But diplomacy can help in pre-terrorist conditions. It can help frame the narrative to have a more balanced dialogue. It can help to give people an alternative script to read from.

In a lot of these countries, these kids, they are unemployed, underemployed, they are frustrated, they are angry, and when they take to the streets or they join these organizations the information flowing into them is stove-piped; it is limited. They do not have anything to counter the BS that they are being fed so it is up to the diplomacy to look for a way to introduce a new channel of communication. And one that we still, I feel, do not use to its maximum utility is social media. I see young faces here and I would be willing to bet you that the young faces back there, you get most of your news on social media. You do not watch Fox News, you do not watch CNN, you do not watch MSNBC, you get it off Yahoo! News, whatever. And so, if you want to communicate to that demographic and you are writing op-eds for the local newspaper and long think pieces for Foreign Policy Magazine, they are not hearing it. You have got to write a nice blog post or have a nice infographic on Instagram or on Facebook. Then you get your message across.

And you have got to engage in a dialogue. I used to spend from about 8:00-10:00 each evening at my residence in Zimbabwe answering questions on Facebook that I would get from young Zimbabweans. And I made it a point to answer them myself. The Minster of Youth Affairs would see me and he would come up and say “he’s trying to take my job…” because I would call a meeting or say I was going to give a speech and invite young people and I would get three times the number of people to show up at a venue than he would get, and it just drove him nuts. But the fact is I was doing what their own government was not doing. I was responding to people personally. That is what diplomacy is all about, and that is what diplomats do routinely, not often in such dramatic circumstances. But the fact is that consular officers interviewing someone for a visa are conducting public diplomacy on our behalf. We need to recognize and mobilize all of this in ways that contribute to a better understanding of extremist groups, and a better framework to create a counter-narrative to the one that they are publishing.

Academic Centers

Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies (IUCTS) Established in 1994, the activities of IUCTS are guided by an International Research Council that offers recommendations for study on different aspects of terrorism, both conventional and unconventional. IUCTS is cooperating academically with universities and think tanks in over 40 countries, as well as with governmental, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental bodies.

International Center for Terrorism Studies (ICTS) Established in 1998 by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, in Arlington, VA, ICTS administers IUCTS activities and sponsors an internship program in terrorism studies.

Inter-University Center for Legal Studies (IUCLS) Established in 1999 and located at the International Law Institute in Washington, D.C., IUCLS conducts seminars and research on legal aspects of terrorism and administers training for law students.

International Advisory and Research Council Honorary Chairman Prof. Edward Teller * Hoover Institution Prof. A. Abou-el Wafa Cairo University Prof. Asher Maoz Tel Aviv University Prof. Jayantha W. Atukorala Sri Lanka Prof. Serio Marchisio Instituto di Studi Giuridcic sulla Prof. Paolo Benvenuti Universita Di Firenze Communita Inernazionale Prof. Edgar Brenner * Inter-University Center for Legal Studies Prof. Dr. Herman Matthijis Free University Brussels Prof. Ian Brownlie Oxford University Prof. Jerzy Menkes Poland Prof. Abdelkader Larbi Chaht Universite D-Oran-Es-Senia Prof. Eric Moonman City University of London Prof. Mario Chiavario Universita Degli Studie Di Torino Prof. Yuval Ne’eman * Tel Aviv University Prof. Irwin Cotler McGill University Prof. Michael Noone The Catholic University of America Prof. Horst Fischer Ruhr University Prof. William Olson National Defense University Prof. Andreas Follesdal University of Oslo Prof. V.A. Parandiker Centre for Policy Research Prof. Gideon Frieder The George Washington University Prof. Paul Rogers University of Bradford Prof. Lauri Hannikaninen University of Turku, Finland Prof. Beate Rudolf Heinrich Heine University Prof. Hanspeter Heuhold Austrian Institute of International Affairs Prof. Kingsley De Silva International Center for Ethnic Studies Prof. Ivo Josipovic University of Zagreb Prof. Paul Tavernier Paris-Sud University Prof. Christopher C. Joyner * Georgetown University Prof. B. Tusruki University of Tokyo Prof. Tanel Kerkmae Tartu University, Estonia Prof. Amechi Uchegbu University of Lagos Prof. Borhan Uddin Khan University of Dhaka Prof. Richard Ward The University of Illinois at Chicago Prof. Walter Laqueur CSIS Prof. Yong Zhang Nankai University, China Francisco Jose Paco Llera Universidad del Pais Vasco *Deceased

Director Professor Yonah Alexander

Senior Advisors Senior Staff Michael S. Swetnam Technical Advisors Sharon Layani CEO and Chairman, Potomac Institute for Mary Ann Culver Patrick Murphy Policy Studies Alex Taliesen

Lisa Winton Professor Don Wallace, Jr. Chairman, International Law Institute

Summer 2017 Internship Program

Slavina “Sally” Ancheva Stetson University Michael Keen Emory University Zachary Fesen Wichita State University Elizabeth Morgan University of Maryland Jillian Goldberg University of Michigan Nicholas Pagel Harvard University Alexandra Hain University of Virginia Isaac Shorser American University Nicole Heitsenrether Georgetown University Chelsea Thorpe University of Georgia

Please contact the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, 901 North Stuart Street, Suite 200, Arlington, VA 22203. Tel.: 703-525-0770 Email: [email protected], [email protected]