Anand Arun
Anand Arun is a Senior Intelligence Officer and Deputy Research Director at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) with nearly two decades of experience leading analysis and briefings in the private sector and US government for customers ranging from deployed military personnel to executive officials--including numerous four-star generals, Ambassadors, and four Presidents.
During his career, he has led analysis on some of the most pressing terrorism issues around the world, and has particular expertise in ISIS and al-Qaeda.
After spending two years as an Open-Source Intelligence Analyst, he began his IC career at State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) in 2007, where he served as both a lead analyst and intelligence briefer on South Asia transnational issues to multiple U.S. Ambassadors and Assistant Secretaries of State. He later worked at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) analyzing homegrown violent extremism and al-Qaeda's external threat to the United States.
In 2011, he joined DIA and quickly rose to serve as the Senior Intelligence Analyst for Middle East terrorism issues for nearly 5 years, not including a deployment to Afghanistan with Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in 2014. In 2016, he was selected as a Senior Reviewer concurrently serving on both DIA’s Defense Intelligence Digest (DID) and Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) staffs, where he was responsible for reviewing DIA articles on all defense topics nominated for publication in the DID and PDB books for customers such as the President, National Security Advisor, and Secretary of Defense.
From September 2018 through January 2020, he worked at the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) headquarters while detailed to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) as the PDB Briefer to the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In this prestigious role, he delivered daily intelligence briefings on all national security issues worldwide to two different Chairmen and Vice Chairmen.
From January 2020 to February 2022, he served as the Senior Intelligence Officer at DIA’s Defense Combating Terrorism Center, where he was responsible for overseeing all of DIA’s analysis on transnational terrorism issues globally.
In February 2022, he was named Deputy Research Director and DIA’s first Chief of Analytic Lessons Learned. In this role, he is responsible for creating and managing the Agency’s lessons learned program for analysis, and developing corresponding analytic tradecraft guidance for all DIA analysts. During his tenure, he has led DIA lessons learned studies evaluating the Agency's response ahead of key security issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
He holds a MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor.