Michael Morell is a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center. Prior to joining the Center in September 2013, he served 33 years with the Central Intelligence Agency, the last three-and-a-half as Deputy Director, a position from which he ran the day-to-day operations of the Agency. Within the CIA, Morell also served as the Director for Intelligence, Executive Director, and twice as Acting Director. Currently, he is a member of President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology.

Former National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, recently named senior fellow with the Belfer Center, will lead a study with Harvard faculty and fellows to analyze the policy implications and opportunities arising from the U.S.-Asia rebalance and will write a report for the Center that assesses the rebalance.

Rami G. Khouri, a veteran Middle East journalist and scholar, captured the intense drama of the nearly three-year-old Arab Spring with one statistic: while many recall the self-immolation by Tunisian activist Mohamed Bouazizi on Dec. 17, 2010, as the spark for the uprisings, Khouri noted that no fewer than 65 Arabs set themselves ablaze in the months following Bouazizi’s act to draw attention to grievances across the region.

Brigadier General Kevin Ryan (U.S. Army retired), has been appointed the Civilian Aide to the Secretary of the Army for the State of Massachusetts.  Ryan is taking on the volunteer Civilian Aide role in addition to his full-time position as director of the Defense and Intelligence Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Dan Meridor, who until recently was Israel’s deputy prime minister and civilian head of intelligence, will be in residence at Harvard Kennedy School for the next month as Lamont Lecturer, hosted by the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

A group of high-ranking U.S. and Russian former government officials, retired military officers, and academics has proposed a series of joint steps that would be necessary to move the two countries beyond the Cold War doctrine of mutual deterrence with nuclear weapons. A new report authored by these nuclear-arms experts says that improved relations between the United States and Russia since 1990 have not resulted in corresponding easing back from the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation. The report suggests a path for the two countries to put nuclear weapons in a context appropriate to the post-Cold War relationship.

Michael Morell, retiring deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has been appointed a non-resident senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Imagine you are an aide to President Obama, making a recommendation about what he should do to confront the toughest foreign policy crises on the agenda: whether to launch military strikes against the Syrian regime; how to minimize the damage from NSA surveillance leaks; how to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

Making such hard choices has long been the core of the oversubscribed Harvard Kennedy School Course, IGA-211: “Central Challenges of American National Security, Strategy and the Press” that Graham Allison and David Sanger are teaching this fall. Harvard graduate students, playing the roles of senior White House advisers, write and then defend strategy memos on how the U.S. should act in these cases.

Now, for the first time, anyone can audit an online version of this course, called HKS211.1x. In addition, 500 successful applicants will be able to enroll and complete weekly assignments, join discussion groups, and earn a certificate of mastery if they pass. Both of these options are available for free through edX, the non-profit online education enterprise founded by Harvard and MIT.

Samantha Power, the former project director of the Human Rights Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs who went on to become a senior foreign policy adviser to President Obama, was nominated today to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.  The President announced Power’s nomination in a ceremony at the White House, in which he also appointed current U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to be his new national security adviser, succeeding Tom Donilon.