Rick Francona

Lt Col Rick Francona, USAF (Ret), enlisted in the Air Force in 1970, and served as a Vietnamese linguist until 1973, conducting missions over Vietnam and Laos. After Arabic language training, he served at a variety of locations in the Middle East from 1975 to 1977, and participated in the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon in 1976. In 1978, he became an Arabic language instructor at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.

Following his commissioning in 1979, Lt Col Francona was an instructor at the Air Force intelligence school in Denver, Colorado. From 1982 to 1984, he was a Middle East operations officer with the National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland. In 1984, he served at the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia. In 1985, he was assigned as an advisor to the Royal Jordanian Air Force in Amman, Jordan.

After a two year staff tour at the headquarters of United States Air Forces in Europe, Lt Col Francona was assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency as the assistant Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East. During this assignment, he spent much of 1988 at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, as a liaison officer to the Iraqi armed forces directorate of military intelligence. Lt Col Francona traveled extensively in combat areas as an observer of Iraqi military operations against Iranian forces, and flew sorties with the Iraqi air force.

Immediately following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990 and through the Gulf War, Lt Col Francona was deployed to the Gulf as the personal interpreter and advisor on Iraq to commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command, General Norman Schwarzkopf. As such, he was the lead interpreter for ceasefire talks with the Iraqi military at Safwan, Iraq, in March, 1991.

After the end of the Gulf War, the colonel served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and was a principal author of the Department of Defense report to Congress on the conduct of the Gulf war. In 1992, he was selected to be the first air attache to the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria, returning to the United States in early 1995. From 1995 to 1996, Lt Col Francona served with the Central Intelligence Agency, and participated in a variety of sensitive overseas operations in the Middle East, and narrowly escaped an attempt on his life by Iraqi agents. In late 1997, Lt Col Francona led a special operations team supporting NATO forces in Bosnia. He returned to the United States, and retired from active duty in 1998.

The colonel has a bachelors degree in government and the Arabic language, and a masters degree in international relations with a concentration in Middle East studies. His decorations include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Bronze Star, and nine Air Medals, as well as campaign awards for service in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and the Balkans. The colonel was awarded the Central Intelligence Agency Seal Medallion for his service with that agency.

He is the author of Ally to Adversary - An Eyewitness Account of Iraq's Fall from Grace.

The colonel is currently an on-air military analyst for the NBC family of networks - NBC, MSNBC and CNBC, as well as Radio Canada.