Spencer Lee

Spencer retired from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2017 after a career spanning three decades. He was a member of the CIA’s Senior Executive Service, and he served six foreign field tours in Europe and Asia. He was Chief of CIA’s Europe Department and was twice a Chief of Station. He was Deputy Chief of CIA’s Global Deployment Center and both a Chief and Deputy Chief of Departments in CIA’s Counterterrorism Center with a scope of responsibility that included technical intelligence and oversight of operations in some of CIA’s most challenging foreign field environments. He was a two-time Chair of the CIA Directorate of Operations’ premier leadership seminar and a regular senior lecturer for other CIA leadership training programs. He believes that the art of intelligence is necessarily a creative endeavor, and he spent much of his CIA career as an innovator and leader of next-generation spycraft. Spencer is a linguist, an oil painter, a martial artist, and a writer who still doesn’t understand why everyone doesn’t advocate the Oxford comma.