Glaspie was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and graduated from Mills College in Oakland, California, in 1963, and from Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in 1965.

[1] She was also the winner of the 1977 Director General's Award for Reporting and as a result her name was inscribed on a permanent plaque in the Department's Foreign Service Lounge.

All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly.When these purported transcripts were made public, Glaspie was accused of having given tacit approval for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which took place on August 2, 1990.

[3][4] Journalist Edward Mortimer wrote in the New York Review of Books in November 1990: It seems far more likely that Saddam Hussein went ahead with the invasion because he believed the US would not react with anything more than verbal condemnation.

That was an inference he could well have drawn from his meeting with US Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, and from statements by State Department officials in Washington at the same time publicly disavowing any US security commitments to Kuwait, but also from the success of both the Reagan and the Bush administrations in heading off attempts by the US Senate to impose sanctions on Iraq for previous breaches of international law.In September 1990, a pair of British journalists confronted Glaspie with the transcript of her meeting with Saddam Hussein, to which she replied that "Obviously, I didn't think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.

Glaspie’s concerns were greatly eased when Saddam told her that the forthcoming Iraq-Kuwait meeting in Jeddah was for protocol purposes, to be followed by substantive discussions to be held in Baghdad.

In response to the ambassador’s question, Saddam named a date when Kuwaiti Crown Prince Shaikh Sa’ad Abdallah would be arriving in Baghdad for those substantive discussions.

)The points referenced in the second and third paragraphs do not appear in the purported transcripts of the Glaspie-Saddam meeting that were released by Iraq, and on which most of the subsequent criticism of Glaspie is based.

Ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time, offered a somewhat different perspective in a 2000 interview on PBS:[10] [Glaspie] took the straight American line, which is we do not take positions on border disputes between friendly countries.

Wilson's and Akins' views on this question are in line with those of former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, who stated in a 1996 interview with Frontline that, prior to the invasion of Kuwait, Iraq "had no illusions" about the likelihood of U.S. military intervention.

[11]Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, writing in The New York Times on February 21, 2003, disagreed with the previously cited views of observers like Edward Mortimer.

On Mortimer's stated belief that it was likely Saddam Hussein went ahead with the invasion because he drew as inference from his meeting with Glaspie that the US would react with nothing more than verbal condemnation, Pollack said: In fact, all the evidence indicates the opposite: Saddam Hussein believed it was highly likely that the United States would try to liberate Kuwait but convinced himself that we would send only lightly armed, rapidly deployable forces that would be quickly destroyed by his 120,000-man Republican Guard.

After this, he assumed, Washington would acquiesce to his conquest.Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt write in the January/February 2003 edition of Foreign Policy that Saddam approached the U.S. to find out how it would react to an invasion into Kuwait.

"[12] Following the US diplomatic cables leak and the January 2011 publication of Glaspie's July 1990 cable describing her discussion with Saddam, Juan Cole noted that Glaspie "pressed the dictator on the meaning of his troop build-up on the Kuwaiti border, letting him clearly know of American anxieties," and argued that "her infamous reference to the U.S. not getting involved in inter-Arab disputes referred to a limited issue, the exact border between Iraq and Kuwait, and could not possibly have been interpreted as permission to invade Kuwait!"

"[13][14] In his 2024 book The Achilles Trap, Steve Coll argues that Glaspie became a convenient scapegoat for broader United States Government failures to recognize and respond to Saddam Hussein's intention to invade Kuwait.

[16] UNITAF's original mandate was to use "all necessary means" to guarantee the delivery of humanitarian aid in accordance to Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.

[17] Major disagreements between the UN and the Somali National Alliance (SNA) began soon after the establishment of UNOSOM II, centering on the perceived true nature of the operations political mandate.

[18] In early May 1993, SNA head General Mohammed Farah Aidid and Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) agreed to convene a peace conference for central Somalia.

[18] As the conference began, Aidid sought assistance from UNOSOM ambassador Lansana Kouyate, who proposed air transport for delegates and a 14-day accommodation.

[22] The contention between the Somali National Alliance and UNOSOM from this point forward would begin to manifest in anti-UNOSOM propaganda broadcast from SNA controlled Radio Mogadishu.

[23] It had in recent weeks begun airing anti American and anti-UNOSOM propaganda condemning interference in Somali politics after UN envoy Admiral Johnathan Howe had rejected the May peace conference Aidid had set up.

[27] Mohammed Sahnoun, the representative of the UN Secretary-General in Somalia during UNOSOM I, reported that rumours of an attempted UN shut down of the station had reached him days before the incident.

It was feared that the broadcasts would shift the attitudes of the Somali public towards the United Nations operation, leading UNOSOM officials to resolve to close the station.

It was decided the American special forces technicians would accompany a Pakistani weapons inspection team to the site in order to determine how to disable the station.

[18] According to the 1994 United Nations Inquiry: Opinions differ, even among UNOSOM officials, on whether the weapons inspections of 5 June 1993 was genuine or was merely a cover-up for reconnaissance and subsequent seizure of Radio Mogadishu.

[30]On the morning of Saturday June 5, 1993 an element of the Pakistani force in Somalia had been tasked with the inspection of site AWSS 5, which happened to be located at Aidid controlled Radio Mogadishu.