The breakfast burritos are tasty on Air Force One. Bill Clinton loves a good pun. And no matter how expert you are, you can be dead wrong. That’s the kind of insider knowledge Steven Simon shared last semester with students in his history class “National Security Decision Making.”
Simon himself helped make plenty of decisions on the National Security Council. In the Obama years, he was senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs. Under Clinton, he was senior director for transnational threats.
These days, Simon is a visiting professor of history at Amherst. And in this course, his students role-played their own NSC meetings, working through an urgent situation, with Simon as the intense, been-there-done-that reality check. For each scenario, they alternated the big parts: chair of the joint chiefs of staff, director of homeland security, secretary of state and more.
In a classroom in Fayerweather hall one spring day, he cooked up this unnervingly plausible scenario. It had to do with Stinger missiles. On a routine patrol of the perimeter of Newark International Airport, an operational missile was found in the weeds. The FBI and TSA immediately searched other airport peripheries and found Stingers at O’Hare, LAX, Dulles and more. (Note: this actually happened at London’s Heathrow airport.)
In response, Simon told the class, the NSC has convened the Principals Committee. This was a small class—just five students—but they took the Stinger threat as seriously as method actors. Some even channeled D.C. fashion statements for the meeting, men wearing neckties, women strands of pearls.
“Let’s start with the intel briefing and decide where to go from there,” said Simon. The director of the National Security Agency, a.k.a. Mount Holyoke senior Arielle Tait, started things off, laying out ideas for who might have planted the missiles. It could be Jaysh al-Islam, a group of Islamist rebels involved in the Syrian Civil War, or white supremacists in Alabama who could be trying to frame outside terrorists. Or maybe it’s the Taliban, Iran, North Korea. They all have their reasons.