Foreign Policy Expert With Newtown Roots Advising Iraq Commander

By John Voket

Peter Thompson may have served in numerous capacities in the military and as a military advisor, traveling to some of the most exotic and war-torn locations around the word, but his deep roots remain firmly planted in Newtown — the community he still calls his true home.

“My family has been in Newtown since before they incorporated the town in 1705,” Mr Thompson said in a recent call from Iraq, where he is currently serving as a civilian foreign policy advisor to the commanding general of the Third Infantry Division.

His grandparents Irvin and Blanche Waterhouse maintained a dairy farm for a time on Hundred Acres Road, and the homestead is still standing on that location today, he said. After his father died in 1963, Mr Thompson recalled moving from Old Greenwich into his grandmother’s home in Sandy Hook, where his mother, Eleanor Waterhouse-Thompson, still resides today.

A short time after arriving in town, he began his first extended stint away from home — first going away to school and graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor of arts in political science, and then earning an executive master’s in leadership from Georgetown University.

He then enlisted in and made a career in the Navy. After his retirement from the Navy in 1985, Mr Thompson returned to Newtown to live full-time.

During his 26 years as an officer in the US Navy, Mr Thompson earned a surface warfare designation in 1975 and accumulating more than 4,700 hours on watch as officer of the deck underway.

“People who know what that means use that as a point of reference. But the high points of my Navy career involved seeing almost every corner of the world,” he said.

During that two-decade span, Mr Thompson commanded a mine hunter and a fast patrol boat, and deployed in surface ships of the Atlantic Fleet to the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean and Arabian Gulf, around Africa and South America, and to Southeast Asia where he saw active combat.

He achieved qualification as a master wargame controller at the US Naval War College, and served on independent duty in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates during and after Operation Desert Storm, eventually retiring from the Navy in the grade of commander.

“After I left active duty and became a reserve officer — while I was still living in Newtown — I was based at the Naval War College,” Mr Thompson said. “Its job was to back up the faculty and war gaming staff. As a result of that, I became qualified as a master war game controller.”

He said while his diverse travel experience helped him envision the environment the war games were supposed to replicate, the games were so high level that the many points of reference he brought to the table with his hands-on experiences were not particularly relevant.

“Keep in mind that I started this in 1989, so the Cold War was still perking along,” he said. “The global series sought to bring together leaders from the political sphere and private industry to game out future scenarios to see what possible changes in international relations and military undertakings might ensue from particular sets of circumstances.”

The foreign advisor said when people typically think about war games, they might envision positioning a military unit on a game table or computer model to “take a particular hill.” But Mr Thompson’s said his input would come into play at a much higher level.

Civilian Life

Between his active duty retirement in 1985 and his departure from the Naval reserve, he commuted from Newtown to Southbury where he worked as a stock broker. It was at that time that Mr Thompson applied for a position and was hired into the State Department.

As a career member of the US Foreign Service, Mr Thompson was one of two lead State Department negotiators for the President’s initiative to exchange terrorist-identifying information with foreign governments, with the objective of interdicting terrorist travel around the world.

His other assignments included serving as consular chief at Embassy Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire; coordinator of the Regional Embassy Office in Kirkuk, Iraq; deputy coordinator for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Dohuk, Iraq; South Asia desk officer in State’s Office of UN Political Affairs in Washington; consular officer at Embassy Paris; reporting officer at the US Mission to the United Nations in New York; and consular officer at Embassy Accra, Ghana.

As a foreign service officer, Mr Thompson is the recipient of the State Department’s Superior Honor and Meritorious Honor Awards, the Department of the Army Superior Civilian Service Award, and the Department of Defense Joint Civilian Service Commendation Award. His military decorations include the Meritorious Service Medal, the Joint Service Commendation Medal, the Navy Commendation Medal, and numerous campaign and service ribbons.

Critical Local Contacts

To illustrate the importance of diplomats like himself in the field, Mr Thompson referenced a historic occurrence.

At the end of 2004 he was positioned in the thick of preparations for the first democratic elections in Iraq, and facing a daunting challenge because Kurds in the Kirkuk province were on the verge of boycotting the election. If that happened, Mr Thompson said it would have called into question the legitimacy of the democratic government that was seeking to be installed in the country.

As the regional coordinator there, he received a call on December 30, that on January 1, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Ambassador John Negroponte and a number of other high ranking officials would arrive to try and speak with Massoud Barzani. But Mr Barzani had already gone back into the mountains to his village to celebrate the new year.

“So here I have this high ranking brass coming in to talk to Barzani, and luckily, I had the contacts to reach him, and persuade him to come back to his headquarters in the Kurdish region on New Year’s Day — to leave his home to come back and speak to the deputy secretary, he said.

“Now I’m not saying I negotiated the settlement, but I had the local contacts. This is the meat and potatoes of my work. To form relationships so we can get fidelity on the true sentiment on the ground.”

Being positioned to communicate this front line information helps to inform the policymaking mechanisms in Washington, he concluded.

“I’m a little flattered that Barzani came on my call, but as a result of that meeting the potential boycott by the Kurds was called off,” Mr Thompson said. “And that was the first step on Iraq’s road to becoming a democratic society.”

Today, Mr Thompson is deployed as United States Division-North/Task Force Marne at COB Speicher, west of Tikrit.

“We call it Speicher after the Naval aviator who was shot down in the first Gulf War, whose remains were only located in Iraq earlier this year,” he said. When he completes his current tour of service, he plans to initially return to northern Virginia where he has a home with his wife, Lisa Gingrich.