Richard Holbrooke

Richard Holbrooke is the consummate political insider and global elite operative. Along with Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and Paul Allaire, Holbrooke directs the American Friends of Bilderberg, an organization that receives financial support from Exxon, Arco, IBM, and other transnational corporations and has its meetings funded by the globalist Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Endowment fund.

From 1999–2001, Holbrooke served as US Ambassador to the United Nations, and he was appointed Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan under the Obama Administration. So far, hints of success in Afghanistan and Pakistan have proven elusive. Holbrooke’s efforts to strengthen the local government and police were dealt a setback in fall 2009 after the Afghanistan presidential election was widely declared fraudulent. He has also made enemies with President Hamid Karzai, who called Holbrooke "the devil." He has also been attacked for his inability to lay out clear goals for the region. He has so far been unwilling to explain what success will look like, saying only “we’ll know it when we see it.”

His foreign policy spans decades, and Holbrooke has always seemed to pop up around the globe at just the wrong time, as in this summer 1998 photo with KLA gunmen in Kosovo. In 1972, he resigned from the Foreign Service to become Managing Editor of the quarterly magazine Foreign Policy, a position he held until 1976. During 1974-75 he also served as a consultant to the President's Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, and was a contributing editor of Newsweek magazine. In 1976 he coordinated National Security Affairs for the Carter-Mondale presidential campaign.

In 1977, President Carter appointed him Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, a post he held until 1981. That same year he became Vice President of Public Strategies, a consulting firm based in Washington, DC and a consultant to Lehman Brothers, eventually assuming a full-time position as Managing Director at Lehman Brothers.

He also served as a member of the Carnegie Commission on America and a Changing World (chaired by Winston Lord), and chairman and principal author of the bipartisan Commission on Government and Renewal, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation and the Institute for International Economics in 1992.

Holbrooke is a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, the Citizens Committee for New York City, and the Economic Club of New York. He has also been Director of the Council on Foreign Relations, the America-China Society, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and the International Rescue Committee.

He was among the prominent politicians who received favorable mortgage deals from Countrywide, a mortgage lender at the heart of the financial implosion. Countrywide's V.I.P program bent rules to offer Holbrooke and his family members a multitude of better mortgage deals which saved them thousands of dollars on interest payments.