DNI names cyber intelligence center leadership
A veteran FBI intelligence analyst will head the Obama administration’s new Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, marking the coming of age of the analyst career track at the bureau, and one of the final steps in getting the multiagency center up and running.
Tonya Ugoretz, the FBI’s chief intelligence officer, will be the cyber center’s first chief, announced Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in a statement Thursday. Her deputy will be the National Security Agency’s senior-most cyber official, Associate Deputy Director for Cyber Maurice “Mo” Bland and the center’s Research Director Thomas Donahue, a three-decade CIA veteran, rounds out the leadership team.
The center will draw on reporting about cyberthreats from across the sprawling and sometimes fractious collection of U.S. spy agencies known as the intelligence community, or IC, fusing them into so-called “all source” analysis. “Connecting the dots” to help policymakers understand foreign cyberattacks and get the best possible information about who is behind them into officials’ hands as quickly as possible.
“CTIIC will lead integrated community analysis of our cyber adversaries and support interagency efforts to develop whole-of-government opportunities against cyber threats,” Clapper said. “It will build understanding of cyber threats to inform government-wide decision-making.”
The center’s “leadership is now in place and building its staff,” Tim Barrett, Clapper’s chief of media relations. “They are not fully staffed yet.”
When President Barack Obama signed a presidential memorandum last February directing the ODNI to establish the center, “the key IC agencies that produce cyber threat reporting worked with ODNI to develop [an] … interagency Pilot Team to plan for CTIIC’s operations,” Barrett said.
The planning at that time called for a staff of 50, drawn from across the intelligence community, he said.
The center received congressional authorization and funding in the December omnibus bill.
Contact the reporter on this story at shaun.waterman@fedscoop.com. Follow him on Twitter @WatermanReports.
