March 09, 2010

Names: Farkas to Pentagon, Von Hippel, Jacobson, Rosand to State CT

Evelyn Farkas, a senior fellow at the American Security Project and a former professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is starting a new job as a senior advisor to Adm. James Stavridis, head of the U.S. European Commander and Supreme Allied Commander, NATO.

Farkas, who will be based out of the Pentagon, will bring in the private sector to help advise, donate, and do business in priority areas, chiefly Afghanistan and Europe, for Stavridis, who testified today before the Senate Armed Services Committee. She will play a role similar to that of Amb. Chuck Ford for U.S. Southcom, who brought industry in to look at the illicit drug business and convened cruise ship security officers to start an information-sharing network, got donations in humanitarian disasters and for hospital ships. Possible issue areas for private-sector-military cooperation include counterterrorism, logistics, and energy.

Farkas previously served as executive director of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, as an international relations professor at the U.S. Marine Corps Academy, and as an OSCE human rights monitor in Bosnia.

Peacekeeping expert Karin von Hippel has recently started as a senior advisor to the State Department Counterterrorism Coordinator Dan Benjamin, her former colleague at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A former United Nations official in Somalia and Kosovo, von Hippel previously served as a senior fellow at King’s College Center for Defense Studies, and most recently co-directed CSIS’s post-conflict reconstruction project (fellow co-director Rick Barton was confirmed in December as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations' Economic and Social Council, Ecosoc). 

Benjamin and von Hippel are due to be joined shortly at the State Department counterterrorism shop by Michael Jacobson, a former Treasury Department sanctions shop official, FBI attorney, and staff member of the Congressional and independent 9/11 commissions, currently with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Also set to join the State CT coordinator office as a senior advisor, Eric Rosand, formerly of the Center for Global Counterterrorism Cooperation.

Meantime, Jon Katz, previously aide to recently retired Florida Democrat Rep. Robert Wexler on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has become a senior advisor in the State Department International Organizations bureau, headed by Assistant Secretary Esther Brimmer.

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