Contract to Serve

By Suzanne Kelly

Suzanne Kelly is CEO and publisher of The Cipher Brief as well as founder of the Cyber Initiatives Group. Before entering the private sector, she served as CNN’s Intelligence Correspondent before spending two years in the private sector. Prior to this, she worked as an executive producer for CNN and as a news anchor at CNN International based in Berlin and Atlanta. In Berlin, Suzanne anchored a morning news program broadcast live in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and in Atlanta, she anchored a number of world news programs. She covered the NATO campaign in 1999 from Kosovo and Macedonia.

The State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, which grew out of the Inman Report recommendations, was never meant to be a war zone security force.  But then again, diplomats were never meant to conduct business as usual in places that were still, in effect, war zones.  Simply put: Iraq was a game changer.

The game started to change in 2003, when The White House tapped retired ambassador Paul Bremer to take control of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which had been tasked with facilitating the handover of power from the U.S. to an Iraqi government.  That meant that U.S. diplomats had to be on hand to facilitate the enormous undertaking of helping to rebuild a destroyed country.  Insurgents were ramping up attacks across the country in an effort to disrupt rebuilding efforts and the diplomats who volunteered to serve were facing risks they had never been trained to face. 

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Subscriber+


Related Articles

How Safe Would We Be Without Section 702?

SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — A provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that has generated controversy around fears of the potential for abuse has proven to be crucial […] More

Search

Close