Martin Edwin Andersen
Guest Author
Martin Edwin Andersen (@InsightCaptain) is a former senior adviser for policy planning at the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and senior adviser for defense and foreign policy for a Senate Majority Whip. More recently, he has served as a professor of history and national security at the National Defense University (NDU) and the U.S. Naval Academy.
The winner of the 2001 U.S. Office of Special Counsel’s “Public Servant Award,” Andersen was its first national security whistleblower recipient. He received the recognition for fighting against U.S. Department of Justice failures to protect CIA classified information, senior Criminal Division management leaving itself open to blackmail in proto-Putin Russia, and myriad issues of financial mismanagement, visa fraud, employee pre-selection and favoritism, and the abuse of travel rules and regulations.
In his most recent case involving U.S. Southern Command and the NDU, Andersen filed three Congressional Disclosures to the Intelligence Community Office of the Inspector General (IC OIG), the latest of which was forwarded by the Director of National Intelligence to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in June 2018. The non-classified part of the scandal included crimes against humanity cases involving the conviction in civilian court of an NDU / Southern Command partner, the criminal prosecution of an NDU Title X employee who had previously belonged to a state terrorist organization, and the outing of a third, whose former organization claimed responsibility for the murder of a U.S. diplomat.
The author of three books, one written in Spanish, he has penned numerous scholarly articles on human rights, the rule of law, indigenous peoples, policing, homeland security, civil rights, maritime security, Latin America, war crimes, and civil-military relations. While teaching at NDU he was the editor of a path-breaking academic peer-reviewed journal published in three languages.
As an investigative reporter, Andersen’s hard-hitting stories have resulted in investigations by Offices of Inspectors General and the FBI. As later recognized in a Miami Herald editorial, he issued a prescient public warning on lax U.S. and Argentine government attitudes about possible terrorist attacks, which then occurred with 85 innocent people murdered in the AMIA Jewish community center bombing in Buenos Aires.
A full-page Sunday New York Times review called Andersen’s “Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the ‘Dirty War’” a “tour de force.” Senator Edward M. Kennedy noted: “How could one of the most civilized nations on the face of the earth be swept away by a bloody and barbaric reign of terror? What was it that caused the kidnapping, torture, and murder of thousands of innocent citizens? In his remarkable history of this terrible time, Mick Andersen has supplied new evidence and new answers to these troubling questions.”
A former president of the Midwest Association for Latin American Studies (MALAS), Andersen has worked in Africa, Europe, and Latin America, always earning “Outstanding” performance reviews.
Security clearances: Top Secret (Inactive); Public Trust (Active).