Whitley Bruner, Chairman
Whitley Bruner, chairman of BKI, served 27 years as an operations officer and Middle East specialist at the Central Intelligence Agency. Bruner served in Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, and Palestine. He was the Agency’s chief of station in Baghdad (during the beginning of the Iraq-Iran war), Algiers (the first CIA official to work with the Algerian security authorities), Tunis (which was facing an internal Islamic threat), and Palestine (where the CIA worked with the Palestinians to establish the security services for the nascent Palestine National Authority). Before leaving the CIA in 1997, Bruner served as deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, specializing in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Levantine affairs, and Saudi Arabia.
Subsequent to his government service, Bruner served as senior counselor in charge of policy analysis and Iraq operations for C & O Resources, a firm specializing in policy consulting throughout the Middle East. After that, he served as director for government and corporate relations for Diligence Middle East, a security company operating in Iraq. This position included primary responsibility for writing a weekly wrap-up on Iraqi political and economic developments, entitled, The Iraq Insider.
As the situation deteriorated in Iraq, Bruner was transferred to the parent company of Diligence Middle East, Diligence LLC, where he served as director of operations during a period of rapid expansion and transition. Bruner also served briefly as director of Middle East operations for Hard Hat Bid, a financial transparency software company with operations in Iraq and Jordan, before becoming a senior consultant with Barbour Griffith & Rogers in April 2006. Subsequently, Bruner served as deputy director for special projects for the Lincoln Group, a strategic communications company with a primary focus on Iraq, before devoting himself entirely to BKI in February 2007.
Bruner grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and attended Exeter Academy before matriculating at Harvard College, where he graduated in 1965. He studied the Arabic language at Harvard University and at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute in Beirut. Prior to entering the U.S. Army, he was enrolled in Harvard’s Middle East Studies M.A. program.
In the Army, Bruner served two tours in Vietnam (25th Infantry Division and First Field Force) and was awarded a Bronze Star for exceptional achievement. His primary CIA awards include the Intelligence Star (for bravery, awarded in Beirut during 1983–84) and the Career Intelligence Medal. Bruner attended the National War College during 1989–90, earning an award for excellence in writing and publishing an analysis of the Soviet role in the Middle East in a professional security journal.
Bruner has appeared on both Fox News as well as on CNN, as an Iraq expert, as well as an expert on various intelligence subjects.
Bruner is married to the former Christine Linehan, previously of the Australian Commercial Service. They have two children, a son and a daughter.
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Charles Kestenbaum, President
Charles Kestenbaum, president of BKI, is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts on Middle East business. He cofounded BKI following a distinguished career as a senior United States Trade Specialist in the Middle East and Asia.
Kestenbaum served 24 years in the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service at U.S. Embassies in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia, and supervised the 1991 Rebuild Kuwait program for the U.S. Department of Commerce. Kestenbaum also has served as commercial liaison office director in the U.S. executive director’s office at the World Bank. He has negotiated trade agreements; counseled U.S. and international companies on all aspects of establishing and running businesses in the region; run trade shows and exhibitions in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Bahrain, and Baghdad; and conducted extensive market research throughout the region.
Since leaving government work in 2002, Kestenbaum has been a Middle East business consultant to Fortune 500 companies, has established several security companies in Iraq, and has worked as a director of business development for a leading international risk management and investigation firm.
Prior to joining the U.S. Foreign Commercial Service in 1979, Kestenbaum worked in Middle East journalism as Cairo bureau manager, Beirut bureau manager, TV producer, radio correspondent, and news editor for NBC News. Kestenbaum covered the Lebanese civil war for NBC News (1975–78) and covered the original Camp David Peace negotiations. He was Cairo correspondent for Mideast markets and wrote for the Middle East Economic Digest.
Kestenbaum is a lecturer and teacher, including preparing Foreign Service officers for Embassy careers and diplomatic assignments through training programs at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center. He teaches classes in anti-corruption, competitiveness, in how U.S. companies operate successfully abroad, in how to forge public/private company relations, and in how to support U.S. economic national security interests by our Embassies abroad.
Kestenbaum has done postgraduate research at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He holds a master’s degree from the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and earned a B.A. in Arabic Studies from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He speaks Arabic, Indonesian, and French.
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