Michael Zantovsky was a founding member of the Civic Forum during the Velvet Revolution. He served as press secretary, spokesman and political director for the President Vaclav Havel. He founded the broadbased thinktank Programme of Atlantic Security Studies in 2003, and later returned to the Foreign Service, serving as ambassador to the United States, Israel and now the United Kingdom. He has translated more than fifty works of contemporary English and American literature into Czech.