James Bruce

James Bruce, Ph.D., is a retired senior executive officer at CIA, an adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown and Florida Atlantic Universities.  At RAND, he leads research projects for U.S. Intelligence Community and Department of Defense clients that focus on intelligence and related issues. 

He retired from CIA at the end of 2005 where he served nearly 24 years.  In the National Intelligence Council, he served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Science and Technology, and as Vice Chairman of the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee operating under the Director of Central Intelligence (now Director of National Intelligence).  He held management positions in CIA’s Directorate of Analysis and in the Directorate of Operations as Chief of Counterintelligence Training.  He also served as a senior staff member on the President’s Commission to investigate the major 2002 WMD intelligence failure on Iraq.  

His unclassified publications have appeared in such professional journals as Studies in Intelligence, the American Intelligence Journal, the Journal of Strategic Security, The Intelligencer, the Defense Intelligence Journal, Group Dynamics, World Politics, several anthologies, and in dozens of RAND reports, most recently on the need for secrecy reform in America.  He co-edited Analyzing Intelligence:  National Security Practitioners’ Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Georgetown University Press, 2014).

His CIA career spanned the final decade of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the pivot to post-Cold War intelligence challenges.  He wrote influential analysis, evaluated operations, and debriefed sensitive Russian defectors and dealt with convicted American spies.  His leadership role in countering foreign deception entailed extensive engagement in all major forms of intelligence collection, human and technical.  He has testified for or briefed Senate and House intelligence and armed services committees.  He is an eight-year member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, and a U.S. Navy veteran.  

Recipient of numerous awards, he won the DCI Galileo Award in 2004, the CIA Career intelligence Medal in 2005, Georgetown University’s Vicennial Award in 2015, and the Gold Medal Bonus Award in 2008 and the Gritton Award in 2015 at the RAND Corporation. He is also on LinkedIn.

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