Early Political Career
In 1969 he joined the Central Intelligence Agency, working as an Operations Officer for a decade, including five years on assignment overseas in East Asia. According to an article by journalist Douglas Valentine in the book "Everything you know is wrong", Simmons ran the Phu Yen Province Interrogation Center from November 1970 to June 1972 and "mounted numerous paramilitary and psychological warfare operations against" the Viet Cong. (Simmons was awarded the CIA's Agency Seal Medal in 1985.) In 1979 he earned a Master of Public Administration from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 1979 he became a staff member for Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island, and then in 1981 the Staff Director for the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence then under the Chairmanship of Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ).
Leaving the Senate staff, he became both a professor of political science at Yale College and the University of Connecticut, and a member of the Connecticut House of Representatives from 1990 to 2000 before running for Congress.
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