Alastair Crooke

Alastair Crooke is a British diplomat, born in Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, in 1949, who worked for nearly thirty years in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) under diplomatic cover, including postings touching Northern Ireland, South Africa, Cambodia, Colombia, Pakistan and the Middle East. He was security adviser to the EU special envoy to the Middle East from 1997 to 2003 and sat on the Mitchell Committee investigating the Second Intifada. In 2004 he founded the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, which advocates engagement between political Islam and the West, and he has been based in Beirut since 2005. He is the author of Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution (2009), and writes for the Strategic Culture Foundation and Eurasia Review. He reaches the audience we track almost entirely as an interview guest.