Ricardel has been appointed to the team covering the US defence and national security issues.
Several days after his election victory, US President-elect Donald Trump appointed members of his official transition team. According to an organizational chart of Trump’s top transition personnel, obtained by the Associated Press, one of the members of the team covering defence and national security issues is Croatian American Mira Radielovic Ricardel.
She served as acting assistant secretary of defence for international security policy during the George W. Bush administration from 2003 to 2005. She is a former vice president of business development for Boeing Strategic Missile & Defense Systems, a major player in the defence industry.
According to Steve Rukavina, TCN contributor who first brought us this news, she was the number one foreign policy advisor to US Senator Bob Dole for many years (Dole was Senate Majority Leader and Republican presidential nominee in 1996). According to Richard Perle, an informal Dole adviser who worked on the Dayton peace talks in 1995, other than Richard Holbrooke, she was the most influential individual in shaping U.S. policy. (Weekly Standard wrote about her role as early as 1995).
Radielovic was raised in Pasadena, California, in a Croatian-speaking household and spent Sundays in a Croatian Catholic church in nearby Arcadia. Her father Petar Radielovic was born in Breza in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A survivor of the Bleiburg massacre, he attended Zagreb University until he fled Yugoslavia in 1954. Petar met his future wife Brigitta in Heidelberg and later emigrated to the United States in 1956, where they wed. He was a self-less husband and father, a loyal friend, patriot and defender of freedom. He died in 2005 in Los Angeles and the funeral mass was held at St. Anthony’s Croatian Catholic Church.
