Alex Alexiev is a Senior Fellow for Eurasia Affairs at the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington D.C. He has logged more than 35 years as a specialist in U.S. national security as a senior analyst and project director with Rand Corporation’s National Security Division, as well as several Washington D.C., think tanks. He has directed numerous research projects for the Department of Defense, Office of Net Assessment, U.S. Army Intelligence, US Air Force intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and other agencies, and has testified before Congress numerous times.
Listen to Alex Alexiev on the Lowell Thomas Award winning travel show “Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer”
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Born and raised in Bulgaria under the communist regime, Alexiev’s father, a revered member of the Intelligencia, was arrested, tortured and killed while his mother spent more than six years in a gulag. Raised by relatives, Alexiev did his undergraduate work at Sofia State University in Bulgaria. Subsequently while living in Germany as a political refugee, Alexiev was sponsored by a priest in Indianapolis Indiana where he went to work as a janitor. He worked his way west and moved to Los Angeles where he attended UCLA, graduating in Political Science. And this is when his life journey turned full circle. Because if his expert understanding of Communist Russia and the dynamics of its multi-ethnic Army, Alexiev was hired as an analyst by the Rand Corporation. His various career assignments include serving as a Faculty member of Rand/UCLA Graduate School for Public Policy from 1984 through 1990. And a mere sampler of Alexiev’s diverse areas of expertise includes a detailed understanding of ethnic and religious conflicts throughout Eurasia and the Middle East, Islamic finance, and Islamic extremism and terrorism. Within days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Caspar Weinberger’s number-two man at the Department of Defense dispatched Alexiev to Afghanistan. Filing monthly reports, Alexiev lived with the Pashtun people off and on for eight years. Subsequent to a stint serving as Director of Radio Free Europe’s Bulgarian Service, shortly after Bulgaria was free of its communist rule, he spent a year in Sofia as pro-bono advisor to the Bulgarian Prime Minister. Alexiev has also been a guest scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The author of 12 books, Alexiev’s most recent is The Wages of Extremism: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West and the Muslim World. I’m Tom Wilmer, come along and join me for a most fascinating conversation with Alex Alexiev.
Link to Alexiev’s June 26, 2003 testimony before the Senate subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-108shrg91326/pdf/CHRG-108shrg91326.pdf