When BayNewser heard that someone from the State Department had emailed Twitter to ask them to delay maintenance to allow Iranians to continue tweeting, we pictured some fusty old guy at Foggy Bottom in a rumpled Brooks Brothers suit and wayward spectacles.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we learned that, instead, it was a 27-year-old whiz kid whose job is to advise the State Department on how to use social media to promote U.S. interests the Middle East.

And imagine our further surprise when we learned this young gentleman wasn't one of Barack Obama's social media geniuses, but instead was a Condi Rice pick hired specifically to advise the State Department on young people in the Middle East and how to "counter-radicalize" them.

According to the New York Times, it was Jared Cohen, a member of the Policy Planning Staff, who contacted Twitter on Monday, inquiring about their plan to perform maintenance in what would be the middle of the day, Iran time. Following that contact, Twitter decided to postpone their maintenance so that it would take place in the middle of the night Iran-time, even though that meant it would be the middle of the day U.S. time.

The Times noted that the move marked "the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country."

So we wondered, who was this young guy with this remarkable insight?

Cohen was only 24 when he was hired into the Policy Planning Staff back in 2006. He'd received an undergraduate degree from Stanford and a master's degree from Oxford, where he'd been on a Rhodes Scholarship. Oh, and he'd also talked his way into a visa for Iran (according to a December 2007 New Yorker profile), where he met young people his own age who threw underground house parties and made alcohol in bathtubs.

"Iranian young people are one of the most pro-American populations in the Middle East," Cohen told the New Yorker. "They just don't know who to gravitate around, so young people gravitate around each other."

Cohen compiled his observations from that trip—and others to Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq—into a book released by Penguin, titled Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (selected, by the way, as one of Kirkus Review's "Best Books of 2007").

Cohen takes Twitter's Jack Dorsey to Iraq, after the jump.

The Times describes Cohen's job today as "working with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other services to harness their reach for diplomatic initiatives in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere."

In May, Cohen, whom CNN chose as one of its "Young People Who Rock," organized a trip to Iraq for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and other new media executives "to discuss how to rebuild the country's information network and to sell the virtues of Twitter," as the Times put it.

According to Federal News Radio, Dorsey has now been working with mobile companies in the Middle East "to establish a short code so that Iraqis can get on Twitter without actually having to have access to the internet."

"I'm a strong believer in the fact that access drives innovation," Cohen told Federal News Radio. "In order for young people to have their innovative minds tapped into, they need to have access to the tools to do it, and I believe that cellphones and the internet will bring that."

Given Cohen's background, it's not surprising that he was the one to make the call on (and to) Twitter. It's also an interesting indication about how these crazy young kids, with their crazy social media-blogging-texing-online video whackiness, might actually understand a thing or two about how the world works and how to get it to move in the direction you want it to go.

On the lighter side, here's Cohen on the Colbert Report in January 2008, explaining how those crazy kids in the Middle East are, in fact, just like us: