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Richard Smith is a California historian and public policy consultant.

Smith began working professionally in politics in 1964, when he took leave from undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, to become a staff aide at the headquarters of the California Democratic Party in San Francisco, organizing a statewide student campaign in opposition to Proposition 14, an initiative measure to overturn the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Later that year, he worked in the US Senate campaign of Alan Cranston and the presidential campaign of Lyndon B. Johnson. He has since worked in the campaigns of congressional, gubernatorial, senatorial and presidential candidates, including the 1972 presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern.

While an undergraduate at Berkeley, Smith began research at the Bancroft Library in the hopes of compiling a history of the California Democratic Party. The work was never completed, but gave him an opportunity to conduct oral history interviews of former Party officials whose involvement dated back to the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations.

After graduation, while serving briefly as a junior CIA officer and analyst in Washington, Smith became interested in Cold War Intelligence history. Again returning to Berkeley, for graduate studies in Public Policy, he began writing the first history of the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS); published by the University of California Press in 1972 the book received a Puliter Prize nomination and is still in print. Smith was also the first biographer of CIA Director Allen Dulles (and uncredited co-author in 1995 of Peter Grose's Gentleman Spy, The Life of Allen Dulles).

He has since written on national security issues for the Washington POST, the Los Angeles TIMES and the International Journal of Intelligence, and has taught foreign policy seminars as an Adjunct Professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. In 1989 and 1990, he directed an Institute for the Study of Intelligence Service, conducting Intelligence study seminars in Washington that brought together noted journalists and academics with government officials and Members of Congress.

A rare book and autograph dealer and appraiser for over forty years, Smith also has expertise in historical manuscripts and has been a consultant on archival collections to the Bancroft Library, Stanford University and the National Intelligence Council in Washington.