SpyFaces in the Crowd: ODNI's Aaron Lukas

The longtime CIA operator's early interest in post-Soviet Europe took him on winding path from libertarian trade specialist to a top spot in the Office of National Intelligence

In his early thirties, Aaron Lukas was on a glide path to wonky influence in Washington D.C. His two-year stint as chief speechwriter for Robert Zoellick, the U.S. Trade Representative, had followed seven years at the Cato Institute, the libertarian gold-standard of conservative Washington think tanks. While still with Zoellick, he continued publishing with Cato.

In April 2024, though, Lukas’ career path was about to take a dramatic swerve. The same month that his last Cato article was published (about trade protectionism), he was on the payroll as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. A year later he was working in CIA operations—the spying and covert action side of the business. And now, 21 years later, Lukas is the principal deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a mouthful of a title responsible for executing the mandate of the agency’s director, Tulsi Gabbard. His job is coordinating and communicating intelligence from and budgets for the entire, 17-member U.S. Intelligence Community. It’s a position that’s been held by such intelligence heavyweights as Michael Hayden, the former Air Force general, NSA chief, and CIA boss under President George W. Bush.

How exactly Lukas, 54, went from a fresh-faced libertarian trade analyst from Arkansas to a “seasoned intelligence professional and former CIA chief of station” according to his official ODNI biography, who handed out “briefcases of cash” as an agency operative (as he put it in a January recruiting pitch), is not entirely clear. But there are hints to be found in his early interests, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.