Francona enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1970, and served as a Vietnamese linguist until 1973, conducting combat aerial
reconnaissance missions over
Vietnam and
Laos in a variety of strategic and tactical aircraft. After Arabic language training, he served at a variety of locations in the Middle East from 1975 to 1977, and supported the
evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in
Beirut, Lebanon in 1976. In 1978, he became an Arabic language instructor at the
Defense Language Institute in
Monterey, California. Following his commissioning in 1979, Francona was an instructor at the Air Force Intelligence School in
Denver, Colorado. From 1982 to 1984, he was a Middle East operations officer with the National Security Agency in the United States and overseas. In 1984, he was assigned as an advisor to the
Royal Jordanian Air Force in Amman,
Jordan. In 1987, he was assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency as the assistant defense intelligence officer for the Middle East. During this assignment, he spent much of 1987 and 1988 at the U.S. Embassy in
Baghdad, Iraq, as a liaison officer to the Iraqi armed forces Directorate of
Military Intelligence. Francona worked an observer of Iraqi
combat operations against
Iranian forces, and flew sorties with the
Iraqi Air Force. His observations were key to the discovery of Iraqi
chemical weapons capabilities and
ballistic missile modifications. Immediately following the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait in August 1990 and through the
Gulf War, Francona was deployed to the Gulf as an interpreter and advisor on Iraqi armed forces to commander in chief of the
U.S. Central Command, General
Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. As such, he was the lead interpreter for ceasefire talks with the Iraqi military at Safwan, Iraq, in March 1991. After the end of the Gulf War, Francona served in the Office of the
Secretary of Defense, and was a principal author of the
Department of Defense report to
Congress on the conduct of the Gulf war. In 1992, he was selected to be the first
air attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria, returning to the United States in 1995. From 1995 to 1996, Francona served with the Central Intelligence Agency, and participated in a variety of sensitive operations in the Middle East. During one of these operations, he survived an attempt on his life by
Iraqi Intelligence Service agents. He was later awarded the CIA Bronze Seal Medallion for his service to the CIA. In 1996, he was selected to lead the development of a Joint Services
counterterrorism intelligence branch. As a direct result of the success in creating this special Task Force, he was asked to lead a special operations team supporting
NATO forces in
Bosnia in late 1997. He returned to the United States and retired from active duty in 1998. ==Commentary==