Lt. Col. Bill Cowan (retired) USMC
Bill Cowan is an adviser to Project Meridian Foundation and an internationally acknowledged expert in the areas of terrorism, homeland security, intelligence and military special operations.
A retired Marine Corps officer, Cowan spent three-and-a-half years on combat assignments in Vietnam. In the 1980s, he was specially selected to serve as one of the first members and as the only Marine in the Pentagon's most classified counterterrorist unit, the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), a unit that to this date remains under the tightest security. While there, Cowan served as a senior military operations officer and field operative on covert missions to the Middle East, Europe and Latin America. Following retirement from the Marine Corps in 1985, from 1989 through 1994, Cowan was again involved in numerous operations in the Middle East in response to terrorist incidents and the holding of Western hostages in Beirut and Kuwait. In 1990, on behalf of a major New York law firm and working with former CIA Director Bill Colby, he organized and successfully conducted a series of operations resulting in the repatriation of a number of Western hostages from Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. Cowan was directly involved in every facet of the Beirut hostages tragedy, including international negotiations leading to their release in 1991. He subsequently organized and participated in a number of successful rescues of children kidnapped from the U.S. by foreign-born parents. He is also the principal subject of a Discovery Channel segment about the Kuwait hostage rescue operation.
He is a co-founder of the WVC3 Group, a company providing homeland security services, support and technologies to government and commercial clients.