The Windham World Affairs Council has announced the first three lectures of its 2005 Durfee Lecture Series.  Ronald Spiers, Ambassador to Pakistan and Turkey, Under Secretary General of the UN for Management;  Haviland Smith, retired director of counter-terrorism for the CIA, and Ambassador Peter Galbraith, currently a Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington D.C, will give talks in September and October at Brooks Memorial Library and World Learning in Brattleboro.

Ambassador Spiers will lead off the series with a talk on "Reforming the UN: What Needs To Be Done, " on Friday, September 16, at 7:30 PM, in the Brooks Memorial Library meeting room. Spiers is a member of Council on Foreign Relations, American Academy of Diplomacy, International Institute of Strategic Studies, and served as Visiting Senior Fellow at Dartmouth’s Dickey Center. He has been involved in foreign affairs since 1955. Has served in various posts including Director of NATO Affairs; Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs; Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research and State Department member of US Intelligence Board; and Under-Secretary of State for Management. He was nominated as UN Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs by President Bush and appointed by UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar and was responsible for coordinating UN activities on Iraq after the 1991 war.

This program is made possible through generous funding by the World Affairs Councils of America, http://www.worldaffairscouncils.org/; Ambassador Hushang Ansary (a former Iranian diplomat and philanthropist); and the American Academy of Diplomacy, http://www.academyofdiplomacy.org/.

Haviland Smith, will speak on Intelligence Collection in Support of Foreign Policy on Wednesday, October 5, at 7:00 PM in the library’s meeting room.  Smith has served three years as Chief of Counterterrorism, received his bachelors degree from Dartmouth College and a masters degree from the University of London. Both degrees are in Russian Studies. Between 1951 and 1954, Smith served in U.S. Army intelligence. From 1956 to 1980 he worked as a CIA operations officer, primarily on Soviet and Eastern European issues. Smith served in Prague, Berlin, Beirut, Tehran, and Washington.

This lecture is cosponsored by the library and the Vermont Humanities Council and is part of the First Wednesdays humanities lecture series of eight talks that will continue at the library through the spring of 2006. For more information on this series please see the library’s web site at www.brooks.lib.vt.us.

Ambassador Peter Galbraith will address the membership on Thursday, October 20, at 7:30 PM in the Rotch Center on the World Learning campus in Brattleboro. Dr. Galbraith will speak on How To Get Out Of Iraq.

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Galbraith is currently a Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington D.C. His mission is to perform work on conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction with particular focus on countries in the arc of crisis extending from the Balkans in the west to Indonesia in the East. As a former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, Galbraith negotiated the 1995 Erdut Agreement that ended the Croatia War. He later served as Director for Political, Constitutional and Electoral Affairs for the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor in 2000-2001. He also has extensive experience in Iraq, India/Pakistan and Southeast Asia. 

 
To find out more about the work the council does, or to join, visit the new Windham World Affairs Council of Vermont web site at www.windhamworldaffairs.org,