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Martha Neff Kessler, an intelligence officer with the Central Intelligence Agency from 1970 until her retirement in 2000, will speak at the University of Delaware on Wednesday, March 26. Her talk, “Intrigue of the Mideast Bazaar,” will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium of Clayton Hall on UD’s Laird Campus, Route 896, north of Newark. Free and open to the public, the talk is part of the Global Agenda Speaker Series, “Spies, Lies and Sneaky Guys.”

During her career, Kessler held analytic and management positions in the Directorate of Intelligence and on the National Intelligence Council, focusing on the Middle East and South Asia.

She was the assistant and the acting national intelligence officer (NIO) for the Near East and South Asia as well as the author of numerous national intelligence estimates on Middle East issues. She headed the directorate's efforts on the Arab-Israeli area for six years and was liaison with U.S. peace negotiators throughout the Madrid peace conference process following the 1991 Gulf War.

Kessler was appointed to the National War College in 1985, where she authored a book on Syria, published in 1987. She also served as a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution from 1996 to 1998, where she published articles on Syria in the Middle East Policy Journal.

She was awarded the National Intelligence Community's Medal of Achievement, the CIA's Medal of Career Achievement and various outstanding performance awards throughout her career for her work during the Lebanon crisis, the rise of political Islam, the Iran-Iraq war (1980's), the Persian Gulf War (1991) and the Middle East peace negotiations.

She currently consults for the CIA and other agencies.
Global Agenda is a program of the University of Delaware’s “American and the Global Community” initiative and is presented in association with the World Affairs Council of Wilmington. For more information, directions and updates, check [www.udel.edu/global] or call (302) 831-2355.

Contact: Beth Thomas, (302) 831-8749
March 13, 2003