An Old Town native who now lives in Lewiston, Costello served overseas as a U.S. foreign-aid officer, responding to political and humanitarian crises in Cambodia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia. Between 1989 and 1994, he was a top aide to Maine Secretary of State Bill Diamond and assisted in expanding voter participation, improving motor vehicle safety laws and regulations, promoting campaign finance reform and facilitating Maine business incorporations.

The Bates College presentation is part of a series of candidate talks sponsored by the Bates Democrats. In addition to his experiences abroad, Costello will discuss the events of Sept. 11 and subsequent U.S. military action in Afghanistan, and the goal of reaching a new understanding concerning collective security.

In his run for Congress, Costello advocates guaranteeing our nation’s physical and economic security through responsible engagement in world affairs and the refinement of the defense, trade, and foreign policy establishments; providing affordable, quality health care through a comprehensive single-payer national health insurance system; and bolstering Social Security by, among other things, establishing government-subsidized savings accounts that supplement Social Security rather than supplanting it.

Blum, abandoning a promising foreign-service career, quit the U.S. State Department in 1967 because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. He then became a founding editor of the Washington Free Press, the first alternative newspaper in the capital, and in 1969 wrote The CIA: A Forgotten History, an exposé that revealed the names and addresses of more than 200 employees of the agency. As a free-lance journalist in Chile in 1972, Blum wrote about the Allende government’s socialist experiment and its overthrow in a CIA designed coup.

Blum now lives in Washington, D.C., doing research at the National Archives and other Washington institutions, working on the staff of Covert Action Quarterly magazine and maintaining the U.S. foreign policy watch on Z magazine’s Web site.