Mitchell Reiss is a senior American diplomat. He served as Director of Policy Planning at the United States Department of State under Colin Powell, and is currently U.S. Special Envoy to Northern Ireland, with the diplomatic rank of Ambassador. He has degrees from Williams College, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Columbia Law School and Oxford. He was also selected to be a White House Fellow and was assigned to the National Security Council, where he worked both for Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell.

He was Chief Negotiator for the United States in the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, an organization set up by the United States, South Korea, and Japan to implement the Agreed Framework on preventing nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula. He has served on the National Security Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Ford Foundation, the Cambridge Institute for Applied Research, the State Department, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

He is Dean of International Affairs, Director of the Reves Center for International Studies, Professor of Law at the William and Mary Law School, and Professor of Government in the Department of Government at the College of William and Mary. He took a leave of absence from these positions while he was at the State Department.

As a Special Envoy to Northern Ireland, he has played an important role in the Northern Ireland peace process. However, Gerry Adams criticized Reiss on March 16, 2006 saying, "I don't have high regards for Mitchell Reiss's input into this process" and "If it is he who is advising the president, it's very very bad advice." Reiss responded "We try very hard to be an honest broker. I think if you look at the record, it demonstrates quite clearly that we don't play favorites - that we call it as we see it... We try to keep our eye on the main objective here - which is moving the peace process forward and keeping the focus on the people of Northern Ireland." Adams criticises Bush's NI envoy — BBC News article, 16 March 2006

Books

• Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities ISBN 0943875714
• Without the Bomb: The Politics of Nuclear Non-proliferation ISBN 023106439X
• Nuclear Proliferation after the Cold War (co-editor/author) ISBN 0943875641
• The Nuclear Tipping-Point (editor) ISBN 8170492270

External links

• Mitchell B. Reiss — official biography from the United States Department of State
• Amazon.com author list
• NI special envoy appointed — BBC News article, 12 December 2003

References