First CIA Officer-In-Residence On US Campus Heads to UT Austin

The Central Intelligence Agency’s first resident intelligence officer on a U.S. campus is coming to the University of Texas at Austin, the school announced Tuesday.

CIA analyst Alan Kessler, who’ll work in the LBJ School of Public Affairs through the fall of 2020, will aim to bridge the gap between the nation’s intelligence community and academia, the university said.

“The LBJ School is home to specialized programs, curriculum and affiliated centers with a shared mission to train the next generation of policymakers across a broad spectrum of issue areas. National security is one of those areas,” said Angela Evans, dean of the LBJ School.

Prior to serving in the CIA, Kessler taught courses on international relations and foreign policy as a faculty member of UT Austin’s Department of Government, the university said. 

As an officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis, Kessler drafted products on strategic communications to support U.S. public diplomacy and developed new methods to assess the effectiveness of technical collection platforms for senior intelligence community and policy customers, the university stated.

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