Richard Carlson is Vice Chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism. He has experience in journalism and diplomacy and is a former United States Ambassador.

Carlson was director of the Voice of America for the last six years of the Cold War, the longest running director-general in the 50-year history of VOA. He ran the worldwide radio network, which broadcast 24 hours a day in about 50 languages to an audience of more than 130 million people, with a fulltime staff of 3,000 and a part-time staff of 1200. He was also responsible for Radio Marti to Cuba and led all US government overseas TV broadcasting, including USIA Film and TV Service and World Net, from 1985 to 1991.

For four years, Carlson was a member of the U.S. delegation to the annual US-USSR Information Talks in Moscow and Washington, D.C. During the same period, he led official U.S. government delegations to the People's Republic of China, to Georgia, USSR, and to Moldavia, USSR. He addressed the Israeli Knesset in 1990 (jointly with Malcolm Forbes, Jr.) and the British House of Commons (jointly with Richard Branson) in July 1993. Carlson has testified dozens of times before various U.S. Congressional committees, including the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Relations Committee. In 1994, Carlson was an international observer at the first democratic elections in South Africa. In the summer of 1997, he was an international observer at the Parliamentary Elections in Albania, overseeing polling places in the lawless region near the Greek border. He has been involved in negotiations on behalf of the U.S. government with many foreign governments, including those of China, Korea, the USSR, Germany, Costa Rica, Belize, Liberia, Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, Morocco and Israel. He is a long-time member of the European Broadcasting Union and the Asian Broadcasting Union.

Carlson was President and CEO of The Corporation for Public Broadcasting for five years. CPB is the parent organization for PBS and NPR. He was also President and CEO of King World Productions Public TV of New York and LA, until the company was bought by CBS in the summer of 1999. Carlson is a former US ambassador to the Seychelles, a country of more than 100 islands off the coast of East Africa. He was appointed by President George H.W. Bush. He is a board member of the Institute for the Study of Terrorism & Political Violence in Washington, DC, where he lives. He is also Chairman of the Board of InterMedia, the global research consulting firm which conducts opinion surveys (for clients like the BCC and US government agencies) in 76 foreign countries.

Richard Carlson is an experienced print and broadcast journalist. He has written, produced and directed three documentary films for ABC TV and one for NBC TV. "Hello Again-With Rod McKuen," was about the poet and songwriter Rod McKuen's search for his missing father. It won a Hollywood Emmy and a "Golden Mike” and was made into the book, "Finding My Father” by Rod McKuen.Carlson has won two other Hollywood Emmy's and two other "Golden Mike” Awards for investigative reporting and was once the head of the ABC-TV Investigative Unit in Los Angeles, which specialized in long-term corruption and malfeasance investigations. Carlson was also a general-assignment reporter and columnist for United Press International and has written hundreds of magazine and newspaper stories. He has won more than a dozen other journalistic prizes, including the George Foster Peabody award.