John O. Brennan - Career Highlights

Career Highlights

Brennan's CIA career, which reached the "highest rungs" of the CIA, included analyst and administrative work in the Washington D.C. area, and overseas work as a spy. At one point, he was a daily intelligence briefer for President Bill Clinton. In 1996 he was CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia when the Khobar Towers bombing killed 19 U.S. servicemen. In 1999 he was appointed chief of staff to George Tenet, then-Director of the CIA. Brennan became deputy executive director of the CIA in March 2001. He was director of the newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center from 2003 to 2004, an office that sifted through and compiled information for President Bush's daily top secret intelligence briefings and employed the services of analysts from a dozen U.S. agencies and entities. One of the controversies in his career involves the distribution of intelligence to the Bush White House that helped lead to an "Orange Terror Alert", over Christmas 2003. The intelligence, which purported to list terror targets, was highly controversial within the CIA and was later discredited. An Obama administration official does not dispute that Brennan distributed the intelligence during the Bush era but said Brennan passed it along because that was his job. . His last post within the Intelligence Community was as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in 2004 and 2005, which incorporated information on terrorist activities across U.S. agencies.

Brennan then left government service for a few years, becoming Chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) and the CEO of The Analysis Corporation(TAC) now renamed as Sotera Defense Solutions. He continued to lead TAC after its acquisition by Global Strategies Group in 2007 and its growth as the Global Intelligence Solutions division of Global's North American technology business GTEC, before returning to government service with the Obama administration. On May 2, 2011, Brennan represented a team that killed Osama Bin Laden. He described the moments watching the SEAL teams move into Osama's compound as "one of the most anxiety filled times in the lives of the people assembled" and that "minutes passed like days". On January 7, 2013, Brennan was nominated by President Barack Obama to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. .