Interview of Friday, 19 February 2021 of Carmen Medina, former CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence, innovator, and coauthor of "Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within" (O'Reilly, 2014). Interviewer: David Priess, former CIA Analyst, Professor at George Mason University. Host: James Hughes, AFIO President, a former CIA Operations Officer.
TOPIC: Carmen Medina discusses how she came to be recruited by CIA, the role of her education, how debating helped her develop the skills that served her well over her CIA career. Priess and Medina discuss her experience of interning at the CIA in 1978, to running the South Africa desk, and leaning into the male-dominated CIA culture to make her voice heard. We hear of her perspective on power, and the role curiosity in her work led to new ways of operating in a vast organization.
The interview runs 38 minutes which includes numerous Q&As.
BIOS:
CARMEN MEDINA is an expert on intelligence analysis, strategic thinking, diversity of thought, and innovation and intrapreneurs in the public sector. She is the co-author (with Lois Kelly) of "Rebels At Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within" and of the Deloitte University Press paper "Diversity’s New Frontier: Diversity of Thought and the Future of the Workplace."
From 2005-07 Carmen was part of the executive team that led the CIA’s Analysis Directorate; in her last assignment before retiring she oversaw the CIA’s Lessons Learned program and led the Agency’s first efforts to address the challenges posed by social networks, digital ubiquity, and the emerging culture of collaboration.
She was a leader on diversity issues at the CIA, serving on equity boards at all organizational levels and across Directorates. She was the first CIA executive to conceptualize many IT applications now used by analysts, including blogs, online production, collaborative tools, and Intellipedia, a project she personally greenlighted. As a senior executive, she began using in 2005 social networking and blogs to reach her diverse workforce. Upon her retirement from CIA, she received the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. From 2011-2015, Carmen was a member of Deloitte Federal Consulting.
Carmen describes herself as Puerto Rican by birth and Texan by nationality.
DAVID PRIESS PhD, served as a senior Intelligence Analyst at CIA, is a Visiting Professor at George Mason University's Schar School, and a Senior Fellow at the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security, also at GMU. He also serves as the COO of The Brooking's Institution's Lawfare Institute.
He served during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush at the CIA as an intelligence officer, manager, and daily intelligence briefer and at the State Department as a desk officer in the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau. During the Bush 43 administration, he personally delivered the President’s Daily Brief for more than a year to Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller and occasionally into the White House.
Priess obtained a BA in political science from Illinois Wesleyan University, his MA in political science from Duke University, and a PhD in political science from Duke University. He has taught political science classes at Duke University, the George Washington University, and George Mason University and presents to audiences nationwide.
Priess has written two books. The first, “The President’s Book of Secrets,” relates how US intelligence officials for more than fifty years have delivered Top Secret intelligence to commanders in chief -- and enabled him to become the first author to interview, for one book, every former administration's living former President, Vice President, and CIA directors. He also authored “How To Get Rid of a President: History’s Guide To Removing Unpopular, Unable, or Unfit Chief Executives.”
JAMES R. HUGHES currently serves as the 17th President of AFIO. His service began January 2015. He had a career of US Government service spanning 37 years in numerous foreign countries with a particular focus in the Middle East. He started in U.S. Military Intelligence in the late 1960s and then joined the CIA’s Clandestine Service. He served overseas as a Chief of Station several times, and at CIA Headquarters in a number of senior management positions, including as Chief of the Near East and South Asia Division, in the Directorate of Operations [today’s National Clandestine Service]. He was also named the Associate Deputy Director of Operations (ADDO) at the National Security Agency, 1998-99. Following his retirement from the government in 2005, he joined EDS in Herndon, Virginia, as the Client Industry Executive for the U.S. Intelligence Community. After the HP acquisition of EDS, he continued to serve in a similar capacity until his retirement in 2012. His parents were missionaries in Turkey in the 1950s, where Jim spent his formative years. He is fluent in Arabic.