Edmund McWilliams

Who is Edmund McWilliams?

Edmund McWilliams is an American diplomat and previous United States Ambassador to Tajikistan.

McWilliams was born in Rhode Island to a father who was a mill worker and a mother who was a cafeteria aide. He majored in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Rhode Island and joined several conservative groups on campus. After graduating he volunteered for the U.S. Army, learned Vietnamese, and was posted to Saigon as an intelligence officer in 1972, where he specialized in interrogations.

Ed McWilliams entered the U.S. Foreign Service in 1975 and served in Vientiane, Bangkok, Thailand, Moscow, Russia, Kabul, Afghanistan, Islamabad, Managua, Nicaragua. His service in Moscow began in 1983 and ended prior to 1986, when he was posted to Kabul, Afghanistan.

McWilliams was dispatched to Islamabad in 1989 as a semi-independent analyst of U.S. policy regarding the Afghan jihad in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal. His blistering criticism of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and their patronage of radical Islamists led to an ultimately-baseless internal investigation regarding his integrity, spearheaded by Ambassador Robert Oakley and CIA Chief of Station Milt Bearden.