Speaker:Robert Lee Suettinger, Former National Intelligence Officer for East Asia, National Intelligence Counsel

More information coming soon.

Robert Lee Suettinger is a historian of contemporary elite politics in the People’s Republic of China. He recently completed a biography of Hu Yaobang (1915-1989), General Secretary and Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party of China, published by Harvard University Press, under a grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation.

Suettinger was a Senior Advisor and Consultant at the Stimson Center, Analytic Director at CENTRA Technology Inc., a Senior Policy Analyst at RAND and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He retired from US government service in 1998, after nearly 24 years in the intelligence and foreign policy bureaucracies. 

He joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1975, and spent his entire career in the analysis of Asian affairs. After several years as an analyst and manager in CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, he was assigned as Director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.  Subsequently, he served for five years as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for East Asia on the National Intelligence Council.

Beginning in March 1994, Suettinger was Director of Asian Affairs on the National Security Council, where he assisted National Security Advisors Anthony Lake and Samuel R. Berger in the development of American policy toward East Asia.  He returned to the NIC as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia in October 1997. Suettinger holds an M.A. from Columbia University and a B.A. from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.  He served in the U.S. Army in the then Republic of Vietnam in 1969-70.