Steve Pieczenik


Steve R. Pieczenik is an American writer, former United States Department of State official, psychiatrist, and publisher.

Early life and education

Pieczenik was born in Cuba of Jewish parents from Russia and Poland and was raised in France. His father, a doctor from Dombrovicz who studied and worked in Toulouse, France, fled Poland before World War II. His mother, a Russian Jew from Białystok, Poland, fled Europe after many of her family members were killed. The couple met in Portugal, where both had fled ahead of the Nazi invaders. Pieczenik was born in Cuba in 1943. After living in Toulouse for six years, Pieczenik's family migrated to the United States, where they settled in the Harlem area of New York City, New York. Steve Pieczenik was 8 years old when his parents received their entry visa to the United States.
Pieczenik is a classical pianist and wrote a full-length musical at the age of 8.
Pieczenik is a Harvard University-trained psychiatrist and has a doctorate in international relations from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After being drafted, Pieczenik says the navy assigned him to St. Elizabeth's Hospital insane asylum where he oversaw several wards of criminally insane patients. After he ordered a lobotomy which ended up killing a man, who was also born in the asylum, an autopsy revealed the man had only half his brain.
Pieczenik's autobiography notes that he attended Booker T. Washington Junior High School in an upper westside neighborhood of New York City. Pieczenik received a full scholarship to Cornell University at the age of 16. According to Pieczenik, he received a BA degree in Pre-Medicine and Psychology from Cornell in 1964, and later received his M.D. from Cornell University Medical College. He attained his PhD in international relations from MIT while studying at Harvard Medical School. Pieczenik claims to be the first psychiatrist ever to receive a PhD focusing on international relations.
While performing his psychiatry residency at Harvard, he was awarded the Harry E. Solomon award for his paper titled: "The hierarchy of ego-defense mechanisms in foreign policy decision making".
An article written by Pieczenik, "Psychological dimensions of international dependency", appears in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol 132, Apr 1975, 428–431.

Professional life

Pieczenik was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and James Baker. His expertise includes foreign policy, international crisis management and psychological warfare. He served the presidential administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the capacity of deputy assistant secretary.
In 1974, Pieczenik joined the United States Department of State as a consultant to help in the restructuring of its Office for the Prevention of Terrorism.
In 1976, Pieczenik was made Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for management.
At the Department of State, he served as a "specialist on hostage taking". He has been credited with devising successful negotiating strategies and tactics used in several high-profile hostage situations, including the 1976 TWA Flight 355 hostage situation and the 1977 kidnapping of the son of Cyprus' president.
As a renowned psychiatrist, he was utilized as a press source for early information on the mental state of the hostages involved in the Iran hostage crisis after they were freed. In 1977, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mary McGrory described Stephen Pieczenik as "one of the most 'brilliantly competent' men in the field of terrorism". He worked "side by side" with Police Chief Maurice J. Cullinane in the Washington, D.C. command center of Mayor Walter Washington during the 1977 Hanafi Siege.
In 1978, Pieczenik was known as "a psychiatrist and political scientist in the U.S. Department of State whose credentials and experiences are probably unique among officials handling terrorist situations".
In 1978 Pieczenik was a special envoy for President Jimmy Carter to Italy to assist in the search for Italy's Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Pieczenik, as an international crisis manager and hostage negotiator in the State Department, was sent to Italy on March 16, 1978, the day that Moro was kidnapped, and was involved in the negotiations for the release of Moro. He was part of a "crisis committee" headed by Francesco Cossiga, the interior minister. Moro was held for 54 days, Pieczenik said the committee was jolted into action by the fear that Moro would reveal state secrets in an attempt to free himself. Moro's widow, Eleonora, later said Henry Kissinger had warned her husband against his strategy of Historic Compromise. "You will pay dearly for it," he is alleged to have said. A false statement, attributed to the Red Brigades, was leaked saying that Moro was dead. Pieczenick revealed that this had a dual purpose; to prepare the Italian public for the worst, and to let the Red Brigades know that the state would not negotiate for Moro, and considered him already dead. Moro was shot and placed in the back of a car in central Rome, midway between the headquarters of the Communist Party and the Christian Democrats. In a documentary Cossiga admitted the committee had taken the decision to release the false statement. Pieczenik said that Moro had been "sacrificed" for the "stability" of Italy.
On September 17, 1978 the Camp David Accords were signed. Pieczenik was at the secret Camp David negotiations leading up to the signing of the Accords. He worked out strategy and tactics based on psychopolitical dynamics. He correctly predicted that given their common backgrounds, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin would get along.
In 1979, he resigned as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State over the handling of the Iranian hostage crisis.
In the early 1980s, Pieczenik wrote an article for The Washington Post in which he claimed to have heard a senior U.S. official in the Department of State Operations Center give permission for the attack that led to the death of U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubs in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1979.
Pieczenik got to know Syrian President Hafez al-Assad well during his 20 years in the Department of State.
In 1982, Pieczenik was mentioned in an article in The New York Times as "a psychiatrist who has treated C.I.A. employees".
In 2001, Pieczenik operated as chief executive officer of Strategic Intelligence Associates, a consulting firm.
Pieczenik has been affiliated in a professional capacity as a psychiatrist with the National Institute of Mental Health.
Pieczenik has consulted with the United States Institute of Peace and the RAND Corporation.
Pieczenik began mentorship of Drew Paul, founder of Blabor.com. Blabor.com is now the production company responsible for Pieczenik's web and media releases.
As recently as October 6, 2012, Pieczenik was listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. According to Internet Archive, his name was removed from the CFR roster sometime between October 6 and November 18, 2012. Publicly, Pieczenik no longer appears as a member of the CFR.
Pieczenik is fluent in five languages, including Russian, Spanish and French.
Pieczenik has lectured at the National Defense University.

Writing ventures

Pieczenik has made a number of ventures into fiction, as an author and as a business partner of Tom Clancy for several series of novels.
He studied medicine and writing, beginning with drama and poetry. But eventually "I turned to fiction because it allows me to address reality as it is or could be."
Pieczenik received a listed credit as co-creator for both Tom Clancy's Op-Center and Tom Clancy's Net Force, two best-selling series of novels, as a result of a business relationship with Tom Clancy. He was not directly involved in writing books in these series, but "assembled a team" including the ghost-writer who did author the novels, and someone to handle the "packaging" of the novels. The Op-Center series alone had earned more than 28 million dollars in net profit for the partnership by 2003.
He's also credited under the pseudonym Alexander Court for writing the novels Active Measures, and Active Pursuit.
Pieczenik has had at least two articles published in the American Intelligence Journal, a peer-reviewed journal published by the National Military Intelligence Association.
In September 2010, John Neustadt was recognized by Elsevier as being one of the Top Ten Cited Authors in 2007 and 2008 for his article, "Mitochondrial dysfunction and molecular pathways of disease." This article was co-authored with Pieczenik.

Authored Novels

In 1992, Pieczenik told Newsday that in his professional opinion, President Bush was "clinically depressed." As a result, he was brought up on an ethics charge before the American Psychiatric Association and reprimanded. He subsequently quit the APA.
He calls himself a "maverick troublemaker. You make your own rules. You pay the consequences."
The role he played in the negotiations to bring about the release of Aldo Moro, an Italian politician kidnapped by the Red Brigades, is fraught with controversy.
In 2017, Pieczenik spoke on Alex Jones's radio show denying the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred as reported, labeling it a "false flag" operation.