MEDIA CONTACT: Polly Burks
561-297-2595, pburks@fau.edu or
Stacia Smith
561-297-2971, ssmith@fau.edu

FAU Presents Lecture on the Secret History of U.S. Counterterrorism

BOCA RATON, FL (February 3, 2005) - Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. war on terrorism did not begin with the attacks of September 11, 2001. In fact, the United States has been waging a secret war on terrorism since the 1960s. Much of this information has been kept from the public eye, but the South Florida community will get a preview of a new book on the subject at a lecture at Florida Atlantic University entitled "Blind Spot: The Secret History of U.S. Counterterrorism." The lecture will be presented by Timothy Naftali, director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs in Charlottesville, Virginia. It will take place on Friday, February 25 at 4:30 p.m. in the Live Oak Pavilion of the University Center on FAU's Boca Raton campus, 777 Glades Road. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Few historians have had better access to the secret history of international affairs than Timothy Naftali. Naftali worked as a consultant for the 9/11 Commission, where he prepared a special report on the history of U.S. counterterrorism operations from 1968 to 1993. That report, based on interviews with high level officials and recently declassified documents, forms the basis for his upcoming book, which will be published in May under the same title as the upcoming lecture.

Naftali also co-authored the book Hell of a Gamble with Russian historian Alexander Fursenko. The book is the first account of the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis to use the minutes of the Politburo and the KGB archives for evidence. Naftali was the first Western researcher to be granted this kind of access. Because of his unprecedented access, Naftali will be publishing another book in January of next year on Soviet foreign policy entitled Khrushchev's Cold War.

In addition, Naftali co-authored a report for the U.S. Congress on American knowledge of Nazi war crimes, and he has written numerous articles and op-eds and given numerous interviews pertaining to U.S. foreign policy, counterterrorism and intelligence.

Naftali directs the Presidential Recordings Program which is the organization responsible for transcribing and analyzing the previously classified White House recordings of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. He also heads the Miller Center's Kremlin Decision-Making Project, which uses recently released documents to reconstruct Soviet policymaking after the death of Joseph Stalin.

The lecture, presented by the Department of History in FAU's Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, is the first in the John O'Sullivan Memorial Lecture Series. The series was initiated as a tribute to the late John O'Sullivan, a former chair of FAU's history department who devoted his entire academic career to FAU. Inspired by O'Sullivan's dynamic teaching, several people who have taken courses at FAU donated money to initiate a lecture series in his honor.

The O'Sullivan memorial will allow FAU's Department of History to host a distinguished scholar in 20th Century American History each Spring for years to come. The lectures will be open to students, secondary school teachers, faculty and the public. They will focus on topics relevant to O'Sullivan's specialties which included World War II, the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the Nuclear Age, and modern American political and diplomatic affairs.

For further information about the lecture or the series, call 561-297-3840.

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