Linda Robinson

Biographical Information
"Linda Robinson is a senior international policy analyst at RAND. In 2011–2012, she was an adjunct senior fellow for U.S. national security and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and in 2013, she was a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center... Her books include Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way out of Iraq; Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces; and Intervention or Neglect: Central America and Panama beyond the 1980s. She previously served as both senior writer for national security and terrorism and Latin America bureau chief at U.S. News & World Report, and she was also senior editor at Foreign Affairs magazine. Ms. Robinson coauthored a study on special operations command and control for the U.S. government from 2008 to 2009.

"Ms. Robinson is currently writing a book on special operations in Afghanistan. She has also been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, senior consulting fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), and author-in-residence at the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at the John Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. She has received the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense and other awards."

Affiliations

 * Advisory Board, Spirit of America

Background
On January 10, 2005, Robinson appeared on Fox News regarding "The Salvador option" a story recently run by Newsweek that had suggested that the United States might resort to using death squads to quell the insurgency in Iraq. According to the Newshounds blog, "Robinson denied the whole thesis of the Newsweek article, saying the situation was 'just the opposite, the squads in El Salvador were opposing the death squads'." 

In October 2003, Robinson provoked controversy by authoring an article in which she claimed that Venezuela was supporting and nurturing Islamic terrorist groups.

Books
Robinson is author of the book Masters of Chaos: the Secret History of the Special Forces, PublicAffairs, October 2004. ISBN 1586482491