Media Advisory

Daniel Benjamin and Gary Samore Join Brookings as Nonresident Senior Fellows

August 13, 2013, Washington, D.C. - Daniel Benjamin, former State Department Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism, and Gary Samore, former Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for Weapons of Mass Destruction Nonproliferation and Counterterrorism, have joined the Brookings Institution as nonresident senior fellows.  Their appointments were announced today by Peter Singer, director of Brookings’ newly-launched Center for 21^st Century Security and Intelligence (21CSI).

Benjamin will serve within the Brookings Intelligence Project, while Samore will join the Arms Control Initiative. Both the Project and the Initiative are part of 21CSI.

“We are pleased to have two such knowledgeable and experienced practitioners join the ranks of the Center on 21^st Century Security and Intelligence,” Singer said. “Both Dan and Gary will make considerable contributions to 21CSI’s research and programs in the months and years ahead as they tackle complex security questions across multiple domains.”

Ambassador Benjamin began his career as a journalist before spending five years on the National Security Council, serving as foreign policy speechwriter and special assistant to President Bill Clinton, and later as director for transnational threats. Benjamin has been a Jennings Randolph Fellow with the United States Institute of Peace, and from 2001 to 2006, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Before joining the Obama Administration, where he led the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, Benjamin was a senior fellow and director of the Center on United States and Europe at Brookings. He currently serves as the Norman E. McCulloch Jr. Director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College.

During the Clinton Administration, Samore worked within the U.S. Department of State on non-proliferation issues, eventually joining the National Security Council as special assistant to the president and senior director for nonproliferation and export controls. Between 2001 and 2005, he served as director of studies and senior fellow at the Institute for Strategic Studies, and later joined the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as vice president for studies.  At CFR, Samore occupied the Maurice R. Greenberg chair and directed the David Rockefeller Studies Program. Currently, Samore is the executive director for research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.