Charles D. Ablard
Counsel
Ex Officio Board Member

Charles Ablard is a lawyer specializing in national security and communications.  He has experience in international communications, administrative and regulatory practice, and government contracts.  He participated in management of two international communications agencies of government, USIA and the Board for International Broadcasting (BIB).  He also served as Chairman of the Administrative Law Section of the American Bar Association and a member of the Standing Committee on Law and National Security of ABA. Currently, he is serving a Temporary Appointment as Administrative Judge, Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Cresencio "Cris" Arcos

Cresencio (Cris) Arcos is Government Affairs Counselor at Kirkpatrick Lockhart and Preston Gates LLP. He was Assistant Secretary and Director of International Affairs at U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2003-2006). Prior to this he was AT&T Corporation’s Vice President and Managing Director for International Public Affairs for Latin America and Canada (1995-2002), where he was responsible for engaging foreign governments and the U.S. government on issues such as market access, regulatory framework, business development and fair competition. He served (1999-2003) as a Member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board at the White House.

Cris retired with the rank of Ambassador from the U.S. Department of State (USIA) after a 25-year career. His last position was Senior Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, 1993-1995. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, 1989-93. Prior to this posting, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, 1988-89. In 1993, he also served on the Department of State’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Task Force.

From 1986-1988, Cris served as The White House Coordinator for Public Diplomacy on Central America and was the Deputy Coordinator in the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America at the Department of State. From 1985-1986, he served as the State Department’s Deputy Director of the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office. His Foreign Service postings abroad included: Belgium, Portugal, Brazil, Soviet Union (Russia) and Honduras.

Cris has a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. from The Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He was a Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Oregon’s Institute of International Studies and was a post-graduate student at the George Washington University’s Institute of Sino-Soviet Studies.

He is a member of: the Council on Foreign Relations, New York; Director, Council of the Americas, New York (1995-2002); U.S. Member, U.N. Drug Control Program Advisory Board, Vienna (1994-1997); Board of the Hispanic Council on International Relations, Washington; Advisory Commission, Florida International University’s Latin America-Caribbean Center (1996-2002); Diplomatic and Retired Consular Officers Association (DACOR); American Foreign Service Association; Board, United Negro College Fund’s Institute of International Public Policy 1995-2003); Board of Visitors, Pan American (Zamorano) Agriculture School, Honduras (1996-2003); Board, Save the Children, Latin America (1997-2000); Board, Foster Care Review, Florida (1998-2002); Pacific Council on International Policy, Los Angeles; Board, Pan American Development Foundation, Washington (2000-2003); Member, The Inter-American Dialogue, Washington (1998-2003); Member, ex officio, Department of Defense Reserved Forces Policy Board (2003-2005); Senior Advisor, The Center for the Study of the Presidency (2006-present).

Published works: "Reasonable and Proportional Security Measures on International Academic Exchange Programs" in Engaging the Arab & Islamic Worlds through Public Diplomacy, ed. W. Rugh, 2004; "Pushing Diplomacy’s Limits" (1997) and "Managing Change" (1991) in Foreign Service Journal; "Central America: New Opportunities, Old Risks" in Journal of International Law and Practice; "Hey Mister Tallymon: Europe and Bananas" in Hemisphere Magazine (1992); "Warriors in Peacetime" in Journal of Small Wars & Insurgencies, Vol. 4. #3, (Winter 1993, London); New Directions for U.S. Policy: Military & Democracy in Latin America, ed. G. Marcella, 1994; "Out of the Vortex" Foreign Service Journal, July 1993; "Telecom" Journal of Commerce, June 10, 1996; "Managing Change in Central America" in Foreign Service Reader: 77 Years of Selected Articles, 1997; "Post-Cold War Foreign Service Blues" Foreign Service Journal, Dec. 1999.

Honors and Awards: State Department Superior Honor Award 1990; Superior Honor Award 1981; Meritorious Honor Award 1977, U.S. Information Agency; the Honduran Government’s highest award, the Order of Morazan; Univ. California (Irvine) Regents’ Fellow (1998-’99).

Cris is listed in Who’s Who in the World, America, the South, the Southwest and Among Hispanics. He speaks Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and Russian. He was born in San Antonio, Texas. From 1968-1970, he served in the U.S. Army as a combat engineer. He is married to Patricia Cordova and has two children.

Richard T. Arndt

Richard Arndt spent 24 years in the US Foreign Service focusing on expanding the potential for cultural diplomacy. Arndt left his professorship in 18th-century French literature at Columbia University in 1961 to take up cultural diplomacy with the US Information Agency and the Department of State, serving as US Cultural Attaché in Beirut, Colombo (Sri Lanka), Tehran, Rome and Paris, and in various positions with USIA and State. On retirement in 1985, he served as Diplomat in Residence at the University of Virginia (1986-89) where he also directed mid-career educational programs and joined the permanent faculty of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction; he then taught at the George Washington University (1992-94). He served on the boards of the National Peace Foundation (NPF), Americans for the Universality of UNESCO (AUU), the Fulbright Association (FA), the Council of International Programs, the National Association of Foreign Student Affairs, the US Committee for the Preservation of Ancient Tyre, the International Society for Educational, Scientific and Cultural Interchange (ISECSI), and on the advisory bodies of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, the American Iranian Council, and the NPF. He is also Founding-President of the Roth Endowment, honoring his late wife and fellow cultural diplomat Lois W. Roth. Dr. Arndt's latest book is entitled, First Resort of Kings: U.S. Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century.

Leonard L. Baldyga
Board Member

Leonard Baldyga is a Senior Consultant at the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) specializing in Eastern Europe. He serves on the Editorial Board of Encyclopedia Britannica's Polish Edition. He is a member of the Executive Committees of Partners for Democratic Change, Sabre Foundation and the National Polish American Jewish American Council. He retired as Career Minister from the U.S. Information Agency and served as Minister-Counselor in New Delhi and Rome, as well as Public Affairs Officer in Mexico and Warsaw. He held senior positions at USIA including Director of the Office of European Affairs. He was Acting Director of the Murrow Center at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts where he also taught courses in international political communication and public diplomacy. He is a member of the American Foreign Service Association's speaker’s bureau.

Martha Bayles

Robert Bemis

Robert Bemis earned a BA from Haverford College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, both in literature. Before joining the Foreign Service in 1970, he worked as a reporter for The Boston Globe and had a two-year Fulbright Lectureship at the University of Baghdad. During a long career in public service, he served in many different capacities including Desk Officer, NEA, USIA; special assistant, associate director for programs, USIA; director for international programs and technology affairs, National Security Council; chief of policy guidance, USIA; chief of foreign service personnel, USIA; post-retirement work for the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, for the Bureau of Management (State), and for the Office of the Inspector General (State).

Jeffrey Biggs

Jeffrey Biggs, Director of the American Political Science Association’s Congressional Fellowship Program since 1997, received a B.A. in History at Harvard, an M.A. in Political Science on a Fulbright from Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University. Biggs served twenty-one years in the US Foreign Service,(in Brazil, Portugal, and Bolivia). After being a Foreign Affairs APSA Congressional Fellow in 1985 (Congressman Thomas Foley, D-WA, and Senator Alan Simpson, R-WY), Biggs served on then-Majority Leader and later-Speaker Foley’s senior staff as press secretary and spokesman from 1987 to 1994. Dr. Biggs also served as senior adviser to the President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy and was a Visiting Fellow at the Freedom Forum. With Foley he is the co-author of Honor in the House: Speaker Tom Foley (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1999; the author of A Congress of Fellows: Fifty Years of the American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship Program 1953-2003, and a number of journal articles. He is married and has two daughters.

Mary G. F. Bitterman

Paul P. Blackburn

During his 40-year career in public diplomacy with the United States Information Agency and the State Department, Paul Blackburn served as Minister Counselor for Public Affairs in the U.S. Embassies in Beijing (1997-2000), Tokyo (1992-1996), Bangkok (1984-1988), and Kuala Lumpur (1980-1984). His last Foreign Service assignment was in the State Department as Director, Office of Public Diplomacy, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Since retiring from the Foreign Service in 2002, he has been working part-time for the State Department’s Freedom of Information (FOIA) office and currently is building a website on "U.S. Diplomacy" for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. Paul holds a Masters Degree from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the School of International Service of American University. In 1990 and 1991 he taught a Masters-level course on Public Diplomacy while at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, and in 2004 gave a revised version of the same course in Hanoi at the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry’s Institute for International Relations.

Harry C. Blaney III

The Executive Director of the Coalition on American Leadership Abroad (COLEAD), at the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), Harry Blaney is a retired Foreign service Officer who served with the Department of State. Additional information is available through the COLEAD website.

John H. Brown

A Princeton Ph.D. in Russian History, John Brown was in the Foreign Service from 1981 to 2003 and served in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade and Moscow. His published works include articles pertaining to Russian affairs. American diplomacy, an on-line journal, posted his "The Purposes and Cross-Purposes of American Public Diplomacy" last year. He has given courses on public diplomacy at Georgetown University and lectured on the topic at other educational institutions. He is currently writing a book on American foreign policy and propaganda for Praeger Publishers.

Michael J. Canning
Board Member

Michael Canning was with the U.S. Information Agency for 28 years in eight overseas posts on four continents, with a particular geographic concentration in Latin America. On Washington assignments, he served in senior positions in the film and television service, personnel, and publications and graduated from the State Department's Senior Seminar. In retirement, he writes movie reviews for an Capitol Hill newspaper and freelances on politics and film. He has also been a public affairs consultant for the Department of State. He is a president emeritius of the USIA Alumni Association.

Brian E. Carlson

Stephen M. Chaplin

Mr. Chaplin was born in Charleston, South Carolina on December 28, 1940. His father was a newspaper editor and his mother a homemaker. He has one young sister, Jerri Chaplin of Charleston,S.C. He is married to Carol McCloskey Chaplin, an attorney with the Board of Veterans Appeals in the Department of Veterans Affairs and has two sons, Christoper D. Chaplin of Pasadena, California and Jonathan B. Chaplin of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Mr. Chaplin graduated from high school in New Orleans, received his B.A. from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio and an M.A. in American History from the University of California at Los Angeles. He served three years as a Public Information Officer in the U.S. Air Force from 1962-65 at Maxwell AFB, Alabama. Mr. Chaplin worked at USIA as a summer intern in 1966 and entered the Foreign Service in June, 1968. After Spanish language instruction he was assigned to Buenos Aires. Next he was assigned to Mexico City and then to Hermosillo in Northwestern Mexico where he was a Branch Public Affairs Officer. Mr. Chaplin attended the Sino-Soviet Studies Institute in George Washington University for a semester prior to Romanian language training and a three year assignment as Director of the American Library in Bucharest from 1974-77. He next worked in Washington first as a Management Analyst, then Desk Officer for France/Spain/Portugal and later as Chief of Fast Policy Guidance in the P Bureau. In 1982 Mr. Chaplin studied Portuguese and was assigned as Counselor for Public Affairs in Lisbon. In 1986 he returned to become first Chief of Foreign Service Personnel, and was then Executive Assistant to the Director of USIA and Deputy Director of USIA. In 1990 he was assigned as Counselor for Public Affairs in Caracas. In 1994 he was assigned back to Washington as Chief of the Resource Management Committee staff. In 1995 he began a two year tour as Director of the Office of Inter-American Affairs where he was responsible for managing USIA staff in Washington, Latin America and the Caribbean and a $40 million annual budget. In the fall of 1997 he was again assigned as Chief of the Resource Management Committee staff and served as a steering group member for the USIA team in negotiations with the Department of State on the integration of USIA into the Department. In addition he headed the Communications Team that was responsible for keeping all USIA, State and USAID employees in Washington and abroad informed of the decisions made related to integration. He retired on October 31, 1999 and since that time, among other assignments; he has chaired the Mexican Advanced Area Studies Course at the Department of State's Foreign Service Institute.

Fred A. Coffey, Jr.

Fred A. Coffey, Jr. joined USIA, following the Foreign Service exam, in August 1956. Assignments were junior officer trainee in Rio de Janeiro; Assistant PAO - Managua; Branch PAO - Medan, Sumatra; Branch PAO - Surabaya , Indonesia (then the largest branch post in East Asia); Director Indonesian Language Service - VOA; Press Attaché, Chief Information Officer, Deputy PAO and Acting PAO - Thailand; Deputy and Acting PAO - Brasilia; Director East Asia Pacific Division - VOA; PAO - Indonesia; TDY Grenada; PAO - Argentina. Along the 35 years with USIA, he worked to establish permanent bilateral institutions in every country where he served. Mr. Coffey's father was an agricultural economist and his family lived in various parts of the US and Paraguay where Fred Jr. attended high school; taught "Americana" at the Paraguay-Estados Unidos Cultural Center and worked on a ranch. Finishing high school in Denton, TX, Coffey attended the University of North Texas and the University of Texas, earning a BA in International Relations. He served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War and achieved the rank of captain. Later he earned an MA in International Economics at Louisiana State University prior to USIA. Other educational experiences included graduate courses at American University, Senior Executive Seminar at Harvard, student at The National War College and later four years as Professor of International Relations at The National War College teaching the "Media and the Military," among other subjects. Overseas Coffey worked in Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian and Thai languages. Following retirement from USIA, he established Coffey Associates to promote business activities in several countries. Current main projects have been to reform the Public Diplomacy process within the Department of State, promote free and transparent elections in 12 overseas elections through monitoring and supervising, overseeing Texas ranch activities, singing in the Singing Capital Chorus (barbershop), assisting the United States - Indonesia Society, chairing a large McLean discussion group (Tertulia) and doing volunteer work. He lives with his wife Jane in McLean, VA. Four children, born overseas, live in various parts of the US. In early years Fred became an Eagle Scout and today enjoys tennis, jogging and other sports.

Scott Cohen
Emeritus Board Member

Scott Cohen served as senior national security advisor to a U.S. Senator, as spokesman and staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as an open source intelligence specialist with the CIA, and as a political press secretary and speechwriter. In recent years as an independent public affairs consultant, his clients have included a council of 32 former presidents and prime ministers chaired by Helmut Schmidt, a committee of 17 Nobel laureates, and an array of government and private sector organizations in the fields of foreign affairs, international development, education, broadcasting and commerce.

Robert T. Coonrod
President
Board Member

Robert T. Coonrod was President and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) from 1997 to 2005. He served as the Corporation's executive vice president and chief operating officer from December 1992. Prior to joining CPB, he was deputy managing director of the Voice of America (VOA). He joined the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1967, serving as a Foreign Service officer in Italy and Yugoslavia. He has also held senior positions in USIA's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. He graduated from Fordham University in 1966. He has also studied Arabic, Italian, Serbian and Slovene.

Sally Grooms Cowal

Ambassador Cowal retired from the Foreign Service in 1995 after serving as Ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago. She was a Career Minister and had also been Deputy Assistant Secretary for Latin America and the Caribbean. Ambassador Cowal’s assignments included Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs in Mexico. After retiring from the Foreign Service, she became the deputy director of the United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) where she was responsible for the organization’s public affairs and for heightening world awareness to the emerging HIV/AIDS crisis. From 1999-2001 Ambassador Cowal was the President of Youth For Understanding International Exchange and from 2001-02 she was President of the Cuba Policy Foundation. Since October 2002, she has been the regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean of Population Services International, a large NGO involved in social marketing of health care in the developing world.

Geoffrey Cowan

For more than 30 years, Geoffrey Cowan has been an important force in almost every facet of the communication world—as a public interest lawyer, academic administrator, best-selling author and award-winning teacher, playwright, television producer, and government official. Since 1996, he has been dean of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, which includes a School of Journalism and a School of Communication. The School has a full-time faculty of more than 60 and nearly 1,900 graduate and undergraduate students. In 2006, he was named the inaugural holder of the Annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership at the Annenberg School and director of the School's Center on Communication Leadership. He holds a joint appointment in the USC Gould School of Law, teaches courses in journalism, and is directly involved in the work and research of a number of major centers and projects at the Annenberg School, including the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, which he founded, the Norman Lear Center, the USC Center on Communication Law and Policy, the Charles Annenberg Weingarten Program on Online Communities and the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future. An award-winning author, Dean Cowan wrote See No Evil: The Backstage Battle Over Sex and Violence on Television (Simon & Schuster, 1980), and the best-selling The People v. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America's Greatest Lawyer (Random House, 1993). Prior to becoming dean, Cowan served the nation as director of the Voice of America. He was appointed to the position by President Clinton in March 1994. He served as the 22nd director of the VOA, the international broadcasting service of the U.S. Information Agency, broadcasting nearly 900 hours of programming in 52 languages, to a weekly audience of about 100 million. He also served as associate director of the USIA and as director of the International Broadcasting Bureau, with responsibility for WORLDNET TV and Radio & TV Marti as well as VOA. Dean Cowan previously taught communication law and policy at UCLA, where he was founding director of the university's Center for Communication Policy. He was honored with several teaching awards during his 20 years at UCLA. Concurrently with his teaching at UCLA, Cowan was a television producer. He received an Emmy Award as executive producer of the television movie Mark Twain & Me, which was voted the Outstanding Prime Time Program for Children by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. From 1979-84, he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, playing a key role in the development of National Public Radio. He co-wrote the radio play, Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers, which won CPB's Gold Medal for Excellence in Best Live entertainment. A major production of the play will be presented at venues around the country next year, along with seminars designed to explore the sometimes delicate balance between the press, public's right to know, and the government's need to protect some vital national secrets. Dean Cowan served as chairman of the Los Angeles commission that wrote the city's ethics code—cited as a model for the nation—for which he was awarded "Man of the Year" by the Council of Government Ethics Leaders. He also chaired the California Bipartisan Commission on Internet Political Practices. Dean Cowan serves on the boards of the Center Theatre Group, California HealthCare Foundation, Children Now, Common Sense Media, and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. Dean Cowan spent four years as principal owner of the Stockton Ports, a Class A farm team for the Milwaukee Brewers. During that time the Ports won two championships and held the best overall record of any team in professional baseball. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School. He is married to Aileen Adams, former Secretary of State and Consumer Affairs for the State of California and former director of the Justice Department's Office for Victims of Crime. She is currently director of arts and culture outreach at USC. They have two children.

Nicholas Cull

Wilson Dizard, Jr.
Emeritus Board Member