Milton Bearden

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Milton Bearden is an American author, film consultant, and former CIA officer.^[1][2][3][4] Bearden served as the president and CEO of the Asia-Africa Projects Group, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that provides resource development and advisory services, from 2010 to 2015. He has been engaged in authorship and film consultancy since 1998.^[5] As of 2016, Bearden resides in Austin, Texas with his wife, Marie-Catherine, a retired university professor -- Georgetown University and The University of Texas at Austin -- and currently a professional consultant on inter-cultural protocols and etiquette.

Early life and education

Bearden was born in Oklahoma and spent his early years in Washington state, where his father worked on the Manhattan Project, and later moved with his family to Houston, Texas. After serving in the United States Air Force, he joined the CIA in 1964. Bearden studied Chinese at the Yale Institute of Far Eastern Languages and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin.^[1]

Career

CIA

During his 30-year career with the CIA, Bearden was a

Bearden was one of the senior CIA officials criticized in the 1994 "snitch fax". The fax was allegedly written by ex-CIA officer David Sullivan, and addressed to members of Congress investigating CIA issues, including the Aldrich Ames spy case.^[7][3]

He was later appointed the Chief of the Soviet/East European Division during the collapse of the

In August 1999, he argued that the threat posed by Osama bin Laden had been blown out of proportion. He called for the U.S. government to renounce "any plans for a unilateral military action against Osama bin Laden or for another cruise missile attack on Afghanistan." Bearden also called for a "serious dialogue" with the Taliban and said that they "have no more obligation to extradite Osama bin Laden to the United States than, say, the French do in the case of Ira Einhorn or the Israelis in the case of Samuel Scheinbein -- both of whom are fugitives from American justice in capital murder cases".^[4]

Following the September 11 attacks, he coined the term "graveyard of empires" to refer to Afghanistan, invoking Afghan victories against outside invaders which had significant political consequences for the invading nations. Bearden predicted that relying on the Northern Alliance against majority ethnic groups would create "a brutal, general civil war that would continue until the United States simply gave up".^[8]

Bearden has provided commentary for several documentaries films and television series, including Nightline, 60 Minutes, Biography, Uncovered: The War on Iraq, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, National Geographic: Inside 9/11, Our Own Private Bin Laden, The Eighties, Afghanistan 1979, Spy Wars, and Afghanistan: The Wounded Land.^[5]

Film consultant

He worked with

• Operation Cyclone
• Michael Pillsbury

Books

• The Black Tulip: A Novel of War in Afghanistan (1998)
  ISBN 0-375-76083-0
• The Main Enemy, The Inside story of the CIA's Final showdown with the KGB, with
  ISBN 0-679-46309-7
• How Did This Happen, Terrorism and The New War (2001) (contributor)
  ISBN 1-58648-130-4