Steve Pieczenik
Steve R. Pieczenik (; born December 7, 1943) is a Cuban-American author, publisher, conspiracy theorist, psychiatrist, and a former consultant for the United States Department of State.

Early life
Pieczenik was born in Havana, Cuba on December 7, 1943, to Russian-Polish parents and 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. 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. Pieczenik was 8 years old when his parents received their entry visa to the United States. He is fluent in five languages, including Russian, Spanish and French.

Education 
Pieczenik received a full scholarship to Cornell University at age 16. 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 in international relations. During his psychiatry residency at Harvard, he was awarded the Harry E. Solomon award for his paper "The hierarchy of ego-defense mechanisms in foreign policy decision making".

An article by Pieczenik, "Psychological dimensions of international dependency", appears in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol 132(4), Apr 1975, 428–431.

Civil service career 
Pieczenik was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and James Baker. He served the presidential administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as 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, he was made Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for management.

At the Department of State, Pieczenik 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's president.

Pieczenik was often used as a press source for early information on the mental state of the hostages in the Iran hostage crisis after they were freed. 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 a special envoy for President Carter to Italy to assist in the search for Italy's Prime Minister Aldo Moro. As an international crisis manager and hostage negotiator in the State Department, Pieczenik was sent to Italy on March 16, 1978, the day Moro was kidnapped, and was involved in the negotiations for his release. 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 (Compromesso storico). "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. Pieczenik claimed 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 made the decision to release the false statement. Pieczenik said that Moro had been "sacrificed" for Italy's "stability".

On September 17, 1978 the Camp David Accords were signed. Pieczenik claims to have been present at secret Camp David negotiations leading to the signing of the Accords, working out strategy and tactics based on psychopolitical dynamics.

In 1979, he resigned as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State over the handling of the Iranian hostage crisis.

Post-civil service career 
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 claims to have known 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". Pieczenik has been affiliated in a professional capacity as a psychiatrist with the National Institute of Mental Health.

In 2001, Pieczenik operated as chief executive officer of Strategic Intelligence Associates, a consulting firm. As recently as October 6, 2012, Pieczenik was listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). According to Internet Archive, his name was removed from the CFR roster sometime between October 6 and November 18, 2012. He no longer publicly appears as a member of the CFR. Pieczenik has consulted with the United States Institute of Peace and the RAND Corporation. Pieczenik has also 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 is a co-author of the book Divide and Conquer. 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 (2001), and Active Pursuit (2002).

Pieczenik has had at least two articles published in the American Intelligence Journal, a peer-reviewed journal published by the National Military Intelligence Association.

Pieczenik co-authored a paper with John Neustadt which appeared in the July 2008 issue of Molecular Nutrition & Food Research.

Controversies 
In 1992, Pieczenik told Newsday that in his professional opinion, President [George H. W.] 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.

The role he played in the negotiations to bring about Aldo Moro's release is fraught with controversy.

Alex Jones 
Pieczenik has made several appearances on InfoWars, the flagship radio program of Alex Jones, where he has made several false statements; he repeatedly claimed the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a "false flag" operation and that the September 11 attacks were conducted by CIA agents. After the 2020 United States presidential election, Pieczenik appeared on InfoWars claiming the Trump administration permitted the Democratic Party to engage in election fraud as a "sting operation" facilitated by a "QFS blockchain encryption code" on every ballot.

Bibliography

Authored novels 

Mind Palace (1985)
Blood Heat (1989)
Hidden Passions (1991)
Maximum Vigilance (1993)
Pax Pacifica (1995)
State of Emergency (1997)
Active Measures (as Alexander Court, 2001)
Active Pursuit (as Alexander Court, 2002)
My Beloved Talleyrand (2005)
Terror Counter Terror (2007)
Steve Pieczenik Talks (2014)
 American Warrior in Crises (2019)

Series co-creator, with Tom Clancy 

Tom Clancy's Op-Center
Tom Clancy's Net Force

Other 

My Life Is Great! Why Do I Feel So Awful? (self-help, 1990)
Foundations and Applications of Medical Biochemistry in Clinical Practice. With John Neustadt. (textbook, 2009)

References

External links
 Official website
 Nutritional Biochemistry Inc. (AKA NBI Health – company co-founded by Pieczenik, and his current workplace)

1943 births
American male novelists
American military writers
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
American psychiatrists
American spy fiction writers
American thriller writers
Cuban Jews
Cuban people of Polish descent
Harvard Medical School alumni
Jewish American writers
Living people
MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni
People from Havana
Tom Clancy
Weill Cornell Medical College alumni
American conspiracy theorists
9/11 conspiracy theorists
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Cuban-Jewish descent
Cuban expatriates in the United States
Cuban emigrants to the United States
American writers of Cuban descent