Mary Quinn

"After college I was commissioned as a Military Intelligence officer in the Army. I served as a Latin America analyst at Ft Bragg and in Washington, DC. I got off active duty and went to graduate school at Stanford for a degree in Latin American History (I did things in reverse order!). I came back to the DC area to teach high school and, after 4 years, I applied for a job with Defense Intelligence Agency and was hired as a civilian analyst. During my time at DIA, I worked as an analyst, collection manager, program manager with assignments in Miami, FL; Newport, RI and multiple locations around the DC area. I retired in 2017, took several months off and started working as a consultant with Deloitte in 2018."

"Before the Coronavirus, I spent most days working at DIA headquarters splitting my time as a senior advisor for our Deloitte team supporting the CIO and meeting with other DIA organizations to check on the status of other firm projects (for example Human Capital, Science and Technology, JCS/J2) to make sure our efforts were on track. As a retired DIA executive, I am able to provide background and context for questions from my Deloitte colleagues on how missions and organizations are related within the agency and in the larger IC."

"The IC must contend with a diverse set of challenges to national security, which is different than it was when I started out when almost all of the focus was on the Cold War, and there seems to be a growing realization of the importance of including diverse viewpoints on how to address those challenges. I think the IC is much warier about the dangers of group think and more willing to listen to different voices which is good news for the job security of intelligence analysts."

"I predict that effectively using classified information and publicly available information to develop more detailed understanding of threats to national security and machine learning and augmented artificial intelligence assisting intelligence officers and policy makers to understand the world around them will be top IC issues this year."

Favorite Books: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe and Bad Blood – Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou