Joseph Zacks

Y. Joseph “Joe” Zacks is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs. Zacks is also the co-founder and managing partner of Aardwolf Global Solutions and managing director of Compass Rose Strategic Consulting.

Zacks has more than forty-two years of experience in national security, including senior leadership roles in the US Army and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). His final government assignment was as deputy assistant director of the CIA for counterterrorism.

Commissioned in 1983, Zacks served twenty-one years on active duty as a field artillery officer, with assignments in South Korea, Cold War-era Germany, and as an army attaché in New Delhi. He also taught at the US Military Academy at West Point and served on the Joint Staff, retiring as a lieutenant colonel.

Zacks then spent twenty-one years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, serving in senior leadership roles at headquarters and overseas in the Middle East and South Asia, including three assignments as chief of station. At headquarters, he led worldwide counterterrorism operations as chief of operations for the Counterterrorism Mission Center and later served as deputy assistant director for counterterrorism. Zacks holds degrees from the College of William and Mary and Duke University. He received the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal and the Director’s Award. He is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations