On June 25, 1996 a truck containing an estimated 5,000-pound bomb drove to the northern perimeter of the Khobar Towers…
Diplomatic Insecurity: The State Department Leaves the U.S. Embassy in Morocco in Peril
Threats against embassies are an ongoing concern that heads of mission, especially in certain parts of the world like the…
Johnny Young – From Abject Poverty to Chief of Mission
Johnny Young, who served in the Foreign Service from 1967 to 2005, was born into abject poverty in the Deep…
The Failed Attempt to Get a Terrorist Mastermind
Imad Mughniyah, Chief of Hezbollah International Operations, was one of the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists and was sought by authorities…
Dark Times in the City of Light
Paris is one of the most beautiful and glamorous places in the world. But like most urban centers, it also…
The Collapse of Order in the Middle East
Will Rogers once observed that “when you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you’ve got to have been looking…
The Middle East Cauldron
Edward “Skip” Gnehm served as Ambassador to Kuwait shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, from 1991 to 1994, and…
The Achille Lauro Hijacking — “These sons of bitches must be prosecuted”
On October 7, 1985, four men, including mastermind Muhammad Zaidan, aka Mohammed Abul al-Abbas, from the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF)…
ADST is On the Air!
(From Left to Right): The U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, after a bomb attack in 1983; Marine Corps Sgt. Clayton…
Ambassador Skip Gnehm on the Middle East
The Middle East has been a complicated, if not violent, region for millennia, which has only been exacerbated by recent…