Robert Townsend is among some of the few men in America familiar with the war of ruse and stratagem between the US and the Soviet Union. His Long War series speaks of decent people who make life-and-death decisions only to be haunted by what they have done.
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War protests, Townsend flew 130 combat missions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. From 1982 to 1989, he was Deputy Chief of the Air Force Intelligence Agency, counter-deception directorate. He is among few men in America familiar with the war of ruse and stratagem between the US and the USSR. He is currently working on the Long War series addressing deception, war, and peace in a 20th-century world of contrived and real moral ambiguity.
Townsend comes from a long line––father, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers––of soldiers, American and pre-American. Slavic on his mother's and a deep-south redneck on his father's side, his parents managed money poorly and told stories well. Spare, pithy, lasting the duration of a Pall Mall cigarette, the tales were to entertain while teaching. No one is entirely useless, he was told. He can always serve as a bad example.
His stories and novels arise from family history, fables, stories told around the kitchen table, and his experiences in America's late 20th-century ambiguous wars, deceptions, and counter-deceptions.
Fluent in Russian and German with a combat vocabulary in French, Townsend graduated from the University of Wisconsin (BA), studied at Freies Universitat Berlin (Certifikat), and received an MA from Georgetown University. Since leaving the intelligence business, he has turned his attention to writing stories and essays.
