John Owen Brennan (born September 22, 1955) is an American former intelligence officer who served as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from March 2013 to January 2017. He served as chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. president Barack Obama, with the title Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President. Previously, he advised Obama on foreign policy and intelligence issues during his 2008 presidential campaign and presidential transition.

Brennan withdrew his name from consideration for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during Obama's first term over concerns about his support for torture, after defending on television the transferring of terror suspects to countries where they might be tortured while serving under President George W. Bush. Instead, Brennan was appointed Deputy National Security Advisor, a position which did not require Senate confirmation.

Brennan's 25 years with the CIA included work as a Near East and South Asia analyst, as station chief in Saudi Arabia, and as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. After leaving government service in 2005, Brennan became CEO of the Analysis Corporation, a security consulting business, and served as chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, an association of intelligence professionals.

Brennan served in the White House as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security between 2009 and 2013. Obama nominated Brennan as his next director of the CIA on January 7, 2013. The ACLU called for the Senate not to proceed with the appointment until they confirmed that "all of his conduct was within the law" at the CIA and White House. Brennan was approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 5, 2013, to succeed David Petraeus as the Director of the CIA by a vote of 12 to 3.

In October 2020, Brennan was among 51 former intelligence officials who signed an open letter stating that the Hunter Biden laptop controversy had "earmarks of a Russian information operation". On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order revoking the security clearances of Brennan and the other signatories. As of September 2025, a Department of Justice criminal investigation into Brennan was reported to be ongoing.

Brennan serves as a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. His inaugural appearance was on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd on Sunday, February 4, 2018.

Early life

Brennan was born and raised in North Bergen, New Jersey, the son of Owen V. and Dorothy (Dunn) Brennan. His Irish father, a blacksmith, emigrated from County Roscommon, Ireland, to New Jersey in 1948. He became a steamfitter, working in Hoboken at Maxwell House.Obituary of Owen V. Brennan His mother was born in Jersey City and was raised in Hoboken. His mother was a graduate of Sacred Heart Academy and employed by the Moore-McCormick shipping company as well as being an active community volunteer. His family includes a sister and a brother. Brennan attended the Immaculate Heart of Mary Elementary School and was graduated from Saint Joseph of the Palisades High School in West New York, New Jersey.

Education

Brennan attended Fordham University and earned a B.A. in political science in 1977. His studies included a junior year abroad learning Arabic and taking courses at the American University in Cairo. He speaks Arabic fluently. While a college student, he voted for the Communist Party USA candidate, Gus Hall, in the 1976 presidential election. He later described his vote as a way of "signaling my unhappiness with the system", specifically the partisanship of the Watergate era. After Fordham, Brennan attended the University of Texas at Austin, receiving a Master of Arts in government with a concentration in Middle East studies in 1980.

While riding a bus to class, he saw a CIA recruiting ad in The New York Times. He decided that a CIA career would be a good match for his "wanderlust" and his desire for public service. He applied to the CIA in 1980. During the application process, he admitted during a lie-detector test that he had voted for the Communist Party candidate four years earlier. To his surprise, he was still accepted; he later said that he found it heartening that the CIA valued freedom of speech.

Career

Brennan began his CIA career as an analyst and spent 25 years with the agency. He was a daily intelligence briefer for President Bill Clinton. In 1996, he was CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when the Khobar Towers bombing killed 19 U.S. servicemen. In 1999, he was appointed chief of staff to George Tenet, then-Director of the CIA. Brennan became deputy executive director of the CIA in March 2001. He was director of the newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center from 2003 to 2004, an office that sifted through and compiled information for President Bush's daily top secret intelligence briefings and employed the services of analysts from a dozen U.S. agencies and entities.

Brennan then left government service for a few years, becoming Chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) and the CEO of The Analysis Corporation (TAC). He continued to lead TAC after its acquisition by Global Strategies Group in 2007 and its growth as the Global Intelligence Solutions division of Global's North American technology business GTEC, before returning to government service with the Obama administration as Homeland Security Advisor on January 20, 2009.

On January 7, 2013, President Obama nominated Brennan to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

On January 20, 2017, Brennan's CIA appointment ended, and he was replaced by President Trump's nominee Mike Pompeo on January 23, 2017.

In September 2017, Brennan was named a Distinguished Non-Resident Scholar at The University of Texas at Austin, where he also acts as a senior advisor to the University's Intelligence Studies Project.Former CIA Director Brennan Joins UT Austin as a Distinguished Scholar University of Texas at Austin (Sep7. 19, 2017). He serves as a consultant on world events for Kissinger Associates.

Counterterrorism advisor to President Obama

Brennan was an early national security adviser to then-candidate Obama. In late 2008, Brennan was reportedly the top choice to become the Director of the CIA in the incoming Obama administration. However, Brennan withdrew his name from consideration because of opposition to his CIA service under President George W. Bush and past public statements he had made in support of enhanced interrogation and the transfer of terrorism suspects to countries where they might be tortured (extraordinary rendition). President Obama then appointed him to be his Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, the president's chief counterterrorism advisor and a position that did not require Senate confirmation. His responsibilities included overseeing plans to protect the country from terrorism and respond to natural disasters, and he met with the president daily.

In August 2009, Brennan criticized some Bush-administration anti-terror policies, saying that waterboarding had threatened national security by increasing the recruitment of terrorists and decreasing the willingness of other nations to cooperate with the U.S. He also described the Obama administration's focus as being on "extremists" and not "jihadists". He said that using the second term, which means one who is struggling for a holy goal, gives "these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek" and suggests the US is at war with the religion of Islam. Brennan told The New York Times in January 2010, "I was somebody who did oppose waterboarding," a claim that he repeated in 2013, during the Senate's hearings about whether to confirm him as Obama's CIA director. None of Brennan's superior officers at the CIA, however, recall hearing his objections, and in 2018, Brennan admitted to The New York Times, "It wasn't as though I was wearing that opposition on my sleeve throughout the agency. I expressed it privately, to individuals."

In an early December 2009 interview with the Bergen Record, Brennan remarked, "the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities have to bat 1.000 every day. The terrorists are trying to be successful just once." At a press conference days after the failed Christmas Day bomb attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Brennan said U.S. intelligence agencies did not miss any signs that could have prevented the attempt but later said he had let the president down by underestimating a small group of Yemeni terrorists and not connecting them to the attempted bomber. Within two weeks after the incident, however, he produced a report highly critical of the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies, concluding that their focus on terrorist attempts aimed at U.S. soil was inadequate. In February 2010, he claimed on Meet the Press that he was tired of Republican lawmakers using national security issues as political footballs, and making allegations where they did not know the facts.

Brennan was present in the Situation Room in May 2011 when the United States conducted the military operation that killed Osama bin Laden. He called Obama's decision to go forward with the mission one of the "gutsiest calls of any president in memory". In the aftermath of the operation, Brennan said that the U.S. troops in the raid had been "met with a great deal of resistance", and bin Laden had used a woman as a human shield.

Drone program

In April 2012, Brennan was the first Obama administration official to publicly acknowledge CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. In his speech, he explained the legality, morality, and effectiveness of the program. The ACLU and other organizations disagreed. In 2011–2012, he also helped reorganize the process, under the aegis of the Disposition Matrix database, by which people outside of war zones were put on the list of drone targets. According to an Associated Press story, the reorganization helped "concentrate power" over the process inside the White House administration. According to The New York Times, Brennan was the "principal coordinator" of U.S. kill lists. Former Obama administration counter-terrorism official Daniel Benjamin has stated that Brennan "probably had more power and influence than anyone in a comparable position in the last 20 years".

In June 2011, Brennan claimed that US counter-terrorism operations had not resulted in "a single collateral death" in the past year because of the "precision of the capabilities that we've been able to develop". Nine months later, Brennan claimed he had said "we had no information" about any civilian, noncombatant deaths during the timeframe in question. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism disagreed with Brennan, citing their own research that initially led them to believe that 45 to 56 civilians, including six children, had been killed by ten US drone strikes during the year-long period in question. Additional research led the Bureau to raise their estimate to 76 deaths, including eight children and two women. According to the Bureau, Brennan's claims "do not appear to bear scrutiny". The Atlantic has been harsher in its criticism, saying, "Brennan has been willing to lie about those drone strikes to hide ugly realities."

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Brennan's comments about collateral death are perhaps explained by a counting method that treats all military-aged males in a strike zone as combatants unless there is explicit information to prove them innocent.

CIA Director (2013–2017)

Nomination