Ronald A. Marks

Ronald Anthony Marks is a former senior CIA official and Capitol Hill Staffer. He is an expert and published author on Cyber security issues and on Homeland Security intelligence. Marks is currently President of Intelligence Enterprises, a national security consulting firm, based in Washington, D.C. He is also Director of the Battelle Memorial Institute's Cyber Doctrine Program.

Personal

Marks was born in Portland, Oregon to Nathan and Margaret Marks. He was raised in Gresham. He graduated from Gresham High School in 1974. Marks received his Bachelors in Business Administration and Economics with honors from Lewis & Clark College in 1978. Marks went on to the study at the Northwestern School of Law (1978-79) and took his Masters in Economics at the University of Oregon in 1982. He lives with his wife of 30 years in McLean, Virginia.

Career

Starting in 1983, Marks spent 16 years with the CIA. During that time he occupied a number of increasingly senior positions including two years (1995-96) as Intelligence Counsel to U.S. Senate Majority Leaders Bob Dole and U.S. Senator Trent Lott.

Since leaving government in 1999, Mr. Marks has been a high-level defense contractor and a software executive. From 2005-10, Marks served as Senior Vice President and Director of Washington, D.C. operations for Oxford Analytica http://www.oxan.com/, a leading international risk analysis firm focused on geopolitics and economics, based in Oxford, U.K.

Since 2011, Marks has served as Director of Battelle Memorial Institute's Cyber Doctrine Program. He leads a series of seminars and papers focused on deriving a United States Government Cyber Doctrine that applies to its cyber activities both domestically and internationally and recognizing there is no true separation between the two in the 21st Century.

Academic and Think Tank Affiliations

Marks has been a Senior Fellow at the George Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) since 2005 where he advises and writes on cyber security issues and domestic intelligence.

Since 1999, Marks has also been a member of the Senior Steering Committee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Transnational Threats Project. There, he focuses on the application and use of cyber space by international organized crime and Islamic terrorist groups.

For six years (2005-2011), Marks served as an Adjunct Professor for Intelligence and National Security at the National Defense University's College of International Security Affairs. There he taught classes on intelligence, homeland security and cyberspace.

Marks has also written on evolving national security and intelligence issues for the academic journals Washington Quarterly, "The Uses and Limits of U.S. Intelligence" (Winter 2002) and the Cambridge University International Review, "Defining America's Brave New World" (July 2002).

In February 2008, Marks testified before the U.S. Senate's Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs advocating Intelligence Community management reform and strengthened oversight in light of an increasingly complex cross-domain issues and bureaucratic structure.

Since 2009, Mr. Marks has served as a National Security commentator for the National Journal.com's National Security Blog. Marks also writes regularly on Cyber security issues for Security Debrief.com. He has been featured commenting on intelligence and cyber related issues on Fox News Channel, NBC, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal , NPR and various other media outlets.

Authored Books

In January 2011, Marks released a book focusing on the challenges and legalities of U.S. Domestic Intelligence collection. Entitled "Spying in America in the Post 9/11 World: Domestic Threat and the Need for Change," published by Praeger Publishing http://www.abc-clio.com/product.aspx?id=52471, Marks lays out the concerns Americans should have over expanding intelligence gathering within the U.S. in response to an imminent threat and the public's lack of oversight over the government agencies involved in it.

In December 2012, Marks served as primary reviewer and a contributor to the Battelle Memorial Institute book, "#Cyber Doctrine No Borders-No Boundaries," published by the Potomac Institute. http://www.amazon.com/CyberDoc-Boundaries-National-Doctrine-ebook/dp/B00A8SDEDO. The book is meant to stir debate on the development of a national doctrine for America in the cyber era. It also focuses attention on the outmoded concepts of "domestic and international" and "private and public" concerns in Cyber space.

Organizational Affiliations

Marks is a member of the Cosmos Club. He is also an associate member of the International Institute for Strategics Studies (IISS), an international think tank based in London, U.K., and is a member of the Atlantic Council.