About

Header for Douglas Wise

AT A GLANCE:
Former Deputy Director, Defense Intelligence Agency

RESEARCH AREAS
Counterterrorism
Cybersecurity
Intelligence / Spycraft
Risk Identification and Mitigation

BIOGRAPHY:
retired from CIA as a member of CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service in August 2016 completing nearly three decades of service. He finished his career with CIA in a Joint Duty Assignment as the Deputy Director of the Defense intelligence Agency. As the Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Doug was the Chief Operating Officer for a 20,000 employee, global defense enterprise supporting senior Defense and National policymakers and the war fighting commands.

He currently serves on a number of national and international corporate boards and provides management/leadership coaching/mentoring to the leadership teams of large corporations. He also engages on risk, security and cyber threats for senior corporate executives and serves on a number of corporate boards. He is a technical and leadership advisor to Los Alamos National Laboratory and he provides interagency and tradecraft training to select units of USSOCOM, JSOU, and supports U.S. Army TRADOC’s War Fighter and NTC Exercises as a regional subject matter expert and Chief of Station role player. He is a frequent public speaker on international developments and national security issues. He is a Cipher Brief Expert and repeat speaker at Chatham House in London. Doug was inducted as a senior member of the Honorary Advisory Board for the International Spy Museum, serves on the Board of Advisors to SpyCraft Entertainment, an innovative start-up connecting the Intelligence Community to the entertainment industry. He was recently selected by the Secretary of Defense to serve on the advisory panel for the Department’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (former DoD UFO Task Force).

Doug’s government post-government service reflects a deep understanding/experience with risk and threat identification as well as working within the U.S. Government and with U.S. and foreign clients to identify human and technical risks and develop and implement risk mitigation strategies and programs. During his nearly thirty years of service in CIA’s Clandestine Service, he had the privilege of leading several of the Agency’s most important components at CIA Headquarters to include serving multiple tours in CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and being the Director of Operations for the Center, and was the Deputy Director/Chief of Operations for the Center for Cyber Intelligence; all providing significant interagency experience. In the course of multiple field assignments, Doug served four times as a Chief of Station, including a 3-year tour as a Chief of Station in Baghdad which was then the largest field station in the Agency’s history. He was also the CIA’s Chief of Operational Training and ran one of CIA’s largest covert action programs.

In addition to PCS assignments in Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia, he has served multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Prior to joining CIA, Doug spent a 20-year career in the U.S. Army in conventional and special operations units (the last 5 of those years on loan to the CIA).

He has earned two technical Master of Science degrees, one from the Ivy League’s Dartmouth College and the other from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. He is honored to be a member of the faculty of the University of New Mexico.

Doug has a working knowledge of Serbian, Albanian, and Thai. He has an active TS/SCI/Q clearance. Doug is the recipient of three prestigious CIA awards, the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, the Donovan Award and the Bush Medal for Counterterrorism. He is married to Cynthia C. Wise a former FBI Special Agent and has three sons.

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