William Blum is one of the United States' leading non-mainstream experts on American foreign policy. He left the State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer because of his opposition to what the US was doing in Vietnam. He then became a founder and editor of the Washington Free Press, the first 'alternative' newspaper in the capital. Blum has been a freelance journalist in the US, Europe and South America, and is the author of Rogue State and America's Deadliest Export.