The nation of Cape Verde, now known as Cabo Verde, is a group of islands located off the western coast…
Mission Unspeakable: When North Koreans Tried to Kill the President of South Korea
On October 9, 1983, while South Korean President Chun Doo-Hwan was on a visit to Rangoon, Burma to lay a…
The Technology of Terror – South America in the 70s and 80s
Terrorism the world over poses a threat to the lives of Foreign Service Officers. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s terrorist…
Crisis Management: Occupation of USIS in South Korea, 1985
On May 25, 1985, seventy-three South Korean students barged into the United States Information Services (USIS) library in Seoul and…
Drogas y Derechos Humanos: Changing U.S. Policy towards Guatemala
In June 1954 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, concerned about the threat of communism in Guatemala, assisted in the overthrow…
Brass Tacks and Kashmir: India-Pakistan Military Crises in the 1980s
A crisis between India and Pakistan erupted between November 1986 and March 1987 after India launched the largest-ever military exercise…
Chipping Away at Czechoslovak Communism: The Helsinki Final Act and Charter 77
The Solidarity Movement. Perestroika and Glasnost. The fall of the Berlin Wall. All of these movements, policies, or events had…
Teaching the Foreign Service to Speak Foreign Languages
The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the primary training institution to prepare American diplomats to advance U.S. foreign affairs interests,…
Bombing North Vietnam into Accepting Our Concessions: Christmas Bombings, 1972
President Richard Nixon ordered plans for retaliatory bombings of North Vietnam after talks to end the war in Vietnam broke…
Modern Turkey’s History of Military Coups
The July 2016 attempted coup d’état in Turkey was the latest in a series of military interventions in the nation’s…