James Bruce, Ph.D., is a retired senior executive officer at CIA, an adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation, an adjunct professor at Georgetown and Florida Atlantic Universities, and formerly at Columbia and American Universities. At RAND, he leads research projects for U.S. Intelligence Community and Department of Defense clients on intelligence and related issues.

He retired from CIA at the end of 2005 where he served nearly 24 years. In the National Intelligence Council, he served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Science and Technology, and as Vice Chairman of the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee under the Director of Central Intelligence (now Director of National Intelligence). He held management positions in CIA’s Directorate of Analysis and in the Directorate of Operations as Chief of Counterintelligence Training. He also served as a senior staff member on the President’s Commission to investigate the major WMD intelligence failure on Iraq.

His CIA career spanned the final decade of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the pivot to post-Cold War intelligence challenges. He wrote influential analysis, evaluated operations, and debriefed sensitive Russian defectors and convicted American spies. His leadership role in countering foreign deception entailed extensive engagement in all major forms of intelligence collection, human and technical. He has testified or briefed before Senate and House intelligence and armed services committees; is an eight-year member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers; and a US Navy veteran.

He has published numerous articles and book chapters on intelligence, espionage, deception, and government secrecy, and co-edited a book on US intelligence analysis (Georgetown Univ. Press, 2014). He has also lectured widely to numerous audiences including Chatauqua (NY), FAU (FL), Sarasota (FL), Vail and Colorado Springs (CO), and a recipient of numerous awards.

Numerous topics on world affairs, with particular emphasis on US and foreign intelligence, including well researched and lively PPT lectures on the following topics:

1. CIA—Challenges and Changes: US Intelligence Adaptation in a Dynamic World
2. The Secrecy Paradigm: Government Secrets and their Management
3. The Foreign Intelligence Threat to the US: Russia, China, and Other Bad Actors
4. Russian Covert Intervention in the 2016 U.S. Elections: What Happened?
5. U.S. Intelligence and Democracy, and Why that Matters
6. The Secrets at Mar-a-Lago
7. True or False—and How Would We Know? Learning from Intelligence Experience
8. U.S. Presidents and their Intelligence Agencies: Highs and Lows from Truman to Trump
9. U.S. Intelligence: Learning Lessons from Successes and Failures
10. The Greatest Spies of the Cold War: Russians, Americans, and Others Who Mattered
11. U.S. Counterintelligence: Catching Spies and Countering Foreign Intelligence
12. U.S. Covert Action: Secretly Exercising Influence Abroad
13. Understanding U.S. Intelligence and its Controversies
14. The U.S. Intelligence Community: What is it and What It Does
15. Intelligence Collection: How Secret Information Is Acquired Abroad
16. Intelligence Analysis: How Is It Done, How Good Is It, and Does It Matter?
17. Edward Snowden: Leaker, Traitor, Hero, or Spy?
18. Robert Hanssen: World Class Spy – His Secret Treachery, Motives, and Means
19. Russia’s Most Controversial Defector: How Yuri Nosenko Divided CIA
20. The Use of Drones and U.S. National Security
21. A Conversation with a Former CIA Officer (for small groups)

As a former counterintelligence officer and Soviet specialist, I developed a six-session course on the Greatest Spies of the Cold War. For cruises to Russia, the Baltics, and the Mediterranean—where CIA has recruited many spies, and where U.S. traitors have also spied for Russia—these lectures can highlight specific geographic interests of these and other espionage cases.

Examples include such Russian spy adventures as the Brits’ spectacular exfiltration of Oleg Gordievsky from Russia through Finland; or the KGB’s capture of Oleg Penkovsky in Moscow where he was quickly executed in the Lubyanka prison for his spying that helped President Kennedy face down Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Soviet Spy Vladimir Vetrov (prophetically codenamed “Farewell”) served in Paris while spying for France (and through them, for the United States) before his execution. And Polish spy Col. Ryszard Kuklinsky (who died in Tampa FL) sailed his own boat on the Vistula River from Warsaw to the Baltic Sea and on to Germany before his defection.

The Russian defector Yuri Nosenko (whom I handled over a two-year period) remains controversial at CIA because of doubts over what he claimed to know about the Kennedy assassination. Later defector Vitaly Yurchenko (whom I debriefed) caused another storm over his own bona fides when he re-defected to Russia while having dinner in a Georgetown restaurant with his CIA handler.

For U.S. spies, CIA operations officer Edward Lee Howard tricked FBI surveillance and defected to Russia; he died in Moscow as a pathetic alcoholic. Many U.S. spies met their KGB handlers in Europe. And discovering the espionage of Felix Bloch in Vienna, the most senior U.S. State Department diplomat to ever spy for Russia, also exposed a deep-cover KGB “illegal” in an amazing and little-known U.S. counterintelligence operation.

I arranged a presentation at CIA HQS by convicted Air Force spy Jeffrey Carney who explained to a captivated audience why his sexual identity crisis led to his espionage with the East German Stasi. While Lee Harvey Oswald was not a spy, he had defected to the Soviet Union then returned to the United States to assassinate President Kennedy. Aldrich Ames who worked at the CIA station in Rome—ironically when Vitali Yurchenko defected from there—was the worst spy in CIA’s history; and my knowing him personally hasn’t mitigated my contempt for his treachery. My closest friend at the Agency, Brian Kelley, was falsely accused by the FBI for being the spy that turned out to be the Bureau’s own Robert Hanssen, possibly the worst American spy in U.S. history. And champion leaker Edward Snowden is a recent defector to Russia.

There is much of geographic interest in the intrigues of Russian and American spies and defectors, and other rogues who present a gallery of fascinating stories to inquisitive travelers where these scoundrels for some countries—and heroes to others—operated in secret. Many Russians who became spies were politically motivated, while most American spies were in it for the money. I’ve learned much from those with whom I’ve had even limited personal contact during my career.

Such special-interest lectures will enrich geography through little-known but historically consequential characters to expand a cruiser’s experience in ways that customary sight-seeing will typically miss.

Extensive speaking in extended learning programs, e.g., the Chautauqua Inst. (NY), Seminars at Steamboat (CO), Vail Symposium (CO), Sarasota Inst. of Lifelong Learning (FL), and Osher Lifelong Learning Inst. at Florida Atlantic Univ. Booked to speak on Crystal Cruise which was canceled due to COVID.