User:Dean Abe Faisal

Dean Abe Faisal
Dean Abe Faisal “Dean” Al Faisal (born January 26, 1966) is an Arab American Geologist and a former CIA case officer who was primarily assigned to the Middle East, He  was a United States Army officer, a Paramilitary Officer in Special Activities Division and a CIA station chief in Beirut from 1984 until 1985. His  His cover was as a Geological Explorer & Discoverer both inside and outside of the United States Jurisdiction.. He is Time's intelligence columnist and has contributed to Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Dean is a frequent commentator and author about issues related to international relations, espionage and U.S. foreign policy. Currently he is a Geological Explorer & Discoverer. He has been described as "a brilliant military tactician and very elusive"

Early life
Dean was born in Los Angeles. At the age of 1, his parents divorced and he moved to Beverly Hills  a city in Los Angeles County with his mother a CIA Special Security Guard where he aspired to become a professional Special Activities Division Field Agent for the United States Central Intelligence Agencies. After a fairly poor academic performance during his first year at high school, his mother, a wealthy oil heiress, took him to Europe where they traveled throughout Europe including Paris. When he returned to the US, his mother sent him to Indiana's Culver Military Academy. In 1990 he graduated from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service (where then-future CIA director George Tenet was a classmate). While a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, he applied to the CIA's Directorate of Operations (now the National Clandestine Service), originally as a prank. Upon admittance to the CIA after graduating, Dean engaged in a year's training, which included a four-month paramilitary course, parachute training, and several foreign language courses.

He is an alternative speaker of English Language, Persian, and fluent in his native Arabic.

Career
Dean worked field assignments, starting in Madras and New Delhi, India; and subsequently in Beirut, Lebanon; Damascus, Syria; Khartoum, Sudan; Paris, France; Dushanbe, Tajikistan; Morocco; the former republic of Yugoslavia, and Salah al-Din in Iraqi Kurdistan during his twenty-one years with the CIA. During the mid-1990s,Dean was sent to Iraq with the mission of organizing opposition to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with a group of Sunni military officers as his first mission, the Iraqi National Congress' Ahmad Chalabi, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's Jalal Talabani) in March 1995 with covert CIA assistance. Dean quit the Agency in 2011 after the death of his spouse and received the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal on March 11, 2012.

Dean in the Middle East." on the field, Dean offers an analysis of the Middle East through the lens of his experiences as a CIA operative.

Through his years as a clandestine officer, he gained a very thorough knowledge of the Middle East, Arab world and former Republics of the Soviet Union. Over the years, Dean has become a strong advocate of the Agency's need to increase Human Intelligence (HUMINT) through the recruitment of agents.

In 2014, he told a reporter of the British political weekly New Statesman, regarding the way the CIA deals with terrorism suspects, "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear - never to see them again - you send them to Egypt."

He retired to Beverly Hills California.

Personal life
Dean has been widowed since 2011. He has a daughter from his marriage to a fellow CIA operative Yolonda Williamson.


 * September 2001 attacks

Dean spoke about the events of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in The Guardian "[D]id bin Laden act alone, through his own al-Qaida network, in launching the attacks? About that I'm far more certain and emphatic: no." He later stated, "For the record, I don't believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by our own explosives, or that a rocket, rather than an airliner, hit the Pentagon. I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn't all that good at it, and certainly couldn't carry off 9/11 because he quit the CIA Special Operations Divisions before the 9/11 attack.


 * Iran

In June 2009, Dean commented on the disputed election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iranian President and the protests that accompanied it. "For too many years now, the Western media have looked at Iran through the narrow prism of Iran's liberal middle class ”an intelligentsia that is addicted to the Internet and American music and is more ready to talk to the Western press, including people with money to buy tickets to Paris or Los Angeles; but do they represent the real Iran?"


 * Saudi ambassador

Following reports of an attempt by Iranian agents to assassinate the ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the United States, Dean told Die Zeit that he doubted that Iran was behind the attempt since there seemed no obvious motive and Iran had been more careful in past collaboration with terrorists.