Communist Revolutionary Warfare

Michael Andrew Sheehan was born in Red Bank, New Jersey on February 10, 1955. He entered the Special Forces after graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1977. He led a clandestine hostage-rescue assault team in Panama in 1979 and carried out antidrug and counterinsurgency missions in El Salvador, Colombia, and Honduras. He received a master's degree from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 1988 and a master's degree from the Army Command and Staff College in 1992. While still on active duty with the Army, he joined the staff of Madeleine K. Albright, when she was United States ambassador to the United Nations. He focused largely on peacekeeping issues. He retired from the military in 1997 as a lieutenant colonel.

In 1998, he was named the State Department's chief of counterterrorism. While in this position, he made his concerns about Osama bin Laden and the dangers of Al Qaeda known. After the 9/11 attacks, he spent two years as an assistant secretary general of the United Nations. In 2003, he headed New York Police Department's new counterterrorism bureau. In 2011, he became an assistant secretary of defense overseeing Special Operations forces and military drone policy worldwide. After leaving the Defense Department in 2013, he became a fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and lectured and consulted. His book, Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves, was published in 2008. He died from multiple myeloma on July 30, 2018 at the age of 63.

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