WASHINGTON -- New CIA Director Porter Goss has replaced the agency's No. 3 official and made several other changes as he closes his first week on the job.
Goss announced Thursday that
Michael Kostiw will replace A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard as the agency's executive director. Kostiw, a former vice president at ChevronTexaco, previously served in the CIA for roughly a decade and ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1986.
http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-cia-personnel-changes,0,4486833.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines
BIO:
Michael V. Kostiw is Vice President, International Government Affairs at ChevronTexaco Corporation in Washington, D.C. He serves on the Corporation's Public and Government Affairs Leadership Team, which provides direction and oversight for the ChevronTexaco Public and Government Affairs function in all global energy operations in more than 180 countries in six continents. Kostiw also manages and coordinates the activities of Brussels, London, Houston, and Singapore Public and Government Affairs offices. His staff serves as ChevronTexaco's principal contact point with the U.S. government foreign policy elements such as the Departments of State, Defense, and the National Security Council. The office is also responsible for ChevronTexaco's relationship with international organizations based in Washington, D.C. and New York City, including the embassies, consulates, and United Nations missions of the countries where the company operates.
Kostiw started with Texaco, Inc, in 1982 in the Latin America/West Africa division after a ten-year career with the Central Intelligence Agency. Mike joined Texaco's Washington, D.C. office in 1987 after a failed attempt to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, and remained with ChevronTexaco after the merger. He is a graduate of St. Bonaventure University and the Harvard University Foreign Policy Management Program. He speaks Spanish, Italian, Ukranian, and Russian.
Kostiw, an Army reserve Colonel, commands a Pentagon Military Intelligence Unit.
He is vice-chairman of the International Republican Institute and is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations. http://www.7revs.org/AdvisoryCommittee/b_kostiw.htm
The International Republican Institute (IRI), which was initially known as the National Republican Institute for International Affairs, receives government funding for international democratization programs, principally from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Founded in 1983, it is “dedicated to advancing democracy, freedom, self-government, and the rule of law worldwide.” IRI states that it is an independent, nonprofit institute that is not affiliated with the Republican Party, and “is guided by the fundamental American principles of individual liberty, the rule of law and the entrepreneurial spirit.” (1)
The IRI is the indirect product of a new agenda of democratic globalism spearheaded in the late 1970s by neoconservatives and their allies in the AFL-CIO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and in the two political parties. This political project to create a quasi-governmental instrument for U.S. political aid came to fruition in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan proposed a new U.S.-led effort to promote free-market democracies around the world. In 1983 Congress approved the creation of NED. This new democratization initiative was funded primarily through the U.S. Information Agency and secondarily through USAID. Designed as a bipartisan institution, NED channels U.S. government funding through four core grantees: IRI, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the Free Trade Union Institute (FTUI)—the AFL-CIO's international operations institute that is currently known as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS).
Like NED itself and the other core grantees, the early focus of IRI was Central America and the Caribbean —a region that in the 1980s was cutting edge of the Reagan administration's revival of counterinsurgency and counter-revolutionary operations.
After the Soviet bloc began to disintegrate in 1989, IRI says it “broadened its reach to support democracy around the globe.” (2) IRI has channeled U.S. political aid to partners—which like itself are often creations of U.S. funding—in 75 countries, and it currently has operations 50 countries. Most recently, it has expanded its operations into Central Asia, having opened offices in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. In Latin America, IRI has offices in Guatemala, Peru, and Haiti. In Africa, IRI has offices in Kenya, Nigeria, and Angola. IRI's offices in Asia are found in Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, and Mongolia. In Central and Eastern Europe, IRI has offices in Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Turkey. There is also an IRI office in Moscow. (3)
The principals of IRI span the center right-far right spectrum of the internationalists in the Republican Party. Most of its staff and board have links to right-wing think tanks, foundations, and policy institutes, while many also represent major financial, oil, and defense corporations. George A. Folsom, IRI's president and CEO, was a member of the Bush-Cheney Transition Team, serving on the Treasury Department task force. An international investment banker, Folsom was a leading member of the Scowcroft Group, an international advisory firm headed by Brent Scowcroft. An adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Folsom is a frequent guest at forums and strategy sessions hosted by the Heritage Foundation, National Defense University, American Enterprise Institute, and Washington Institute for Near East Policy. IRI's vice president of strategic planning and Latin America expert is Georges Fauriol, the former director of the Americas program at CSIS, where he cochaired with Ambassador Otto Reich the Americas Forum, a hemispheric network of like-minded policy professionals. Among other affiliations of Fauriol are his work with the right-wing Foreign Policy Research Institute and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Since the early 1980s Fauriol has worked closely with right-wing Cuban Americans such as Otto Reich and is a member of the Center for a Free Cuba. Among the corporations represented on the IRI's board are Lockheed Martin (Alison Fortier), Chevron Texaco (Michael Kostiw), AOL Time Warner (Robert Kimmitt), and Ford (Janet Mullins Grissom). Senator John McCain (R-AZ) is IRI's chair. Michael Grebe, the president and CEO of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and former general counsel to the Republican National Committee, sits on IRI's board. Other prominent IRI board members include: J. William Middendorf, Frank Fahrenkopf, Jr., and Brent Scowcroft. (4)
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/iri.php
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