An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, public safety, and foreign policy objectives.
Condoleezza Rice is an American diplomat and political scientist who is the current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A member of the Republican Party, she previously served as the 66th United States secretary of state from 2005 to 2009 and as the 19th U.S. national security advisor from 2001 to 2005. Rice was the first female African-American secretary of state and the first woman to serve as national security advisor. Until the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, were the highest-ranking African Americans in the history of the federal executive branch. At the time of her appointment as Secretary of State, Rice was the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States to be in the presidential line of succession.
The Hoover Institution is an American public policy think tank that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government. While the institution is formally a unit of Stanford University, it maintains an independent board of overseers and relies on its own income and donations. It is widely described as a conservative institution, although its directors have contested its partisanship.
Plausible deniability is the ability of people, typically senior officials in a formal or informal chain of command, to deny knowledge of or responsibility for actions committed by or on behalf of members of their organizational hierarchy. They may do so because of a lack or absence of evidence that can confirm their participation, even if they were personally involved in or at least willfully ignorant of the actions. If illegal or otherwise disreputable and unpopular activities become public, high-ranking officials may deny any awareness of such acts to insulate themselves and shift the blame onto the agents who carried out the acts, as they are confident that their doubters will be unable to prove otherwise. The lack of evidence to the contrary ostensibly makes the denial plausible (credible), but sometimes, it makes any accusations only unactionable.
Ronald Anthony MarksFRSA is a former senior Central Intelligence Agency official and Capitol Hill Staffer. He is currently Chairman and CEO of ZPN Cyber and National Security Strategies and an academic focused on Cyber and Intelligence policy issues. His book "Spying in America in the Post 9/11 World: Domestic Threat and the Need for Change," published by Praeger Publishing, focuses on the vast expansion of intelligence collection in America and the need for careful oversight.
Charles Thomas Fingar, is a professor at Stanford University. In 1986 Fingar left Stanford to join the State Department. In 2005, he moved to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as the deputy director of National Intelligence for Analysis and concurrently served as the chairman of the National Intelligence Council until December 2008. In January 2009, he rejoined Stanford as a Payne Distinguished Lecturer in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Stephen David Krasner is an American academic and former diplomat. Krasner has been a professor of international relations at Stanford University since 1981, and served as the Director of Policy Planning from 2005 to April 2007 while on leave from Stanford.
Wilbur Crane "Bill" Eveland III was a World War II veteran, a CIA station chief, and critic of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. His autobiographical book, Ropes of Sand (1980), details the many failures of the CIA vis-a-vis the Middle East during the Cold War.
Michael Joseph Morell is an American former career intelligence analyst. He served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2010 to 2013 and twice as its acting director, first in 2011 and then from 2012 to 2013. He also serves as a professor at the George Mason University - Schar School of Policy and Government.
Gloria Charmian Duffy is a former U.S. Department of Defense official, businesswoman, social entrepreneur and nonprofit executive. Since 1996, she has been the president, CEO and a member of the Board of Governors of the Commonwealth Club of California, America's largest and oldest public forum, founded in 1903. From 2010 to 2017 she led the acquisition, financing, design, entitlements and construction of the club's first headquarters building, at 110 The Embarcadero in San Francisco. The grand opening for the club's new building took place on September 12, 2017. The building received a 2016 California Heritage Council award for historic preservation.
Bruce O. Riedel is an American expert on U.S. security, South Asia, and counter-terrorism. He is currently a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He also serves as a senior adviser at Albright Stonebridge Group.
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is professor of American history emeritus and an honorary fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is an authority on American intelligence history, having written two American intelligence history surveys and studies of the CIA and FBI. He has also written books on women and American foreign policy, America and the Vietnam War, and American labor history.
National security of the United States is a collective term encompassing the policies of both U.S. national defense and foreign relations.
Mariano-Florentino "Tino" Cuéllar is an American scholar, academic leader, public official, jurist, and nonprofit executive currently serving as the 10th president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was previously a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford University and director of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, co-chair of the U.S. Department of Education's Equity and Excellence Commission, and an executive branch official in the Clinton and Obama administrations. His publications address problems in American public law, international affairs and international law, artificial intelligence, public health and safety law, and institutions and organizations. He serves on the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Social and Ethical Implications of Computing Research, he was elected to the President and Fellows of Harvard College in February 2019 and serves as chair of the board of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. He was born in Northern Mexico.
Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe is a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, having been appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009. After serving her term as ambassador, Donahoe was appointed as Director of Global Affairs for Human Rights Watch. In 2014, she was also appointed to the board of International Service for Human Rights. She is also an affiliate of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, a center of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Executive Director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at the Freeman Spogli Institute's Cyber Policy Center working at the intersection of governance, technology and human rights.
The Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy (MIP) at Stanford University is a two-year graduate program granting the Master of Arts degree. Housed within Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, MIP is a multidisciplinary program dedicated to the study and analysis of international affairs. The current director of MIP is Francis Fukuyama, also the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Dr. Chonira Aturupane is the associate director of academic and student affairs.
Martha Crenshaw FBA is a political scientist who is prominent for her research on terrorism. She is professor of political science at Stanford University since 2007, as well as senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).
Colin Hackett Kahl is an American government official and academic who served as under secretary of defense for policy in the administration of President Joe Biden from April 28, 2021, to July 14, 2023. Previously, he served as national security advisor to the vice president under then-Vice President Joe Biden (2014–2017). After the Obama administration, Kahl served as a Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow at Stanford University.
Janne E. Nolan was an American academic, foreign policy advisor, and expert on nuclear arms control and nonproliferation. She held senior positions in the Department of State, as a staffer for the Senate, and served on multiple blue ribbon commissions. She was well known for supporting generations of women in the traditionally male dominated field of nuclear security.
The National Open Source-Intelligence Agency (NOSA) is a proposed 19th member of the United States Intelligence Community (IC) to be tasked with the collection and exploitation of open-source intelligence (OSINT). Creation of the agency would consolidate open source efforts across the US government into a new functional manager for the open-source intelligence discipline, drawing resources from the Open Source Enterprise of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Open Source Integration Center (OSIC) of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, as well as other open source focused entities across the government.
