Born in Jersey City on September 22, 1955, John Owen Brennan is a senior US government official who has been head of the CIA since March 2013. Previously, he served as the head of the National Anti-Terrorism Center, and from 2009 to 2013 he worked in the team of Barack Obama as an adviser on the fight against terrorism.
Years of youth
John Brennan, whose biography began in the town of North Bergen, New Jersey, grew up in a family of Irish immigrants who arrived from Roscommon County. He studied at the University of Fordham in New York and in 1977 received a bachelor's degree in political science. He spent a one-year internship abroad at an American university in the Egyptian capital Cairo, and defended his master's degree in public administration with a focus on the Middle East region in 1980 at the University of Texas at Austin. Speaks fluently in Arabic, it was this skill that enabled him to build a career in the special services.
The wife of John Brennan is called Katie Poklouda Brennan, they have three children: a son and two daughters.
The initial stage of professional activity
Brennan worked for the CIA for a long time, among other posts were analysts in the Middle East and South Asia, as well as an adviser in Saudi Arabia. Some information resources report that at this time he converted to Islam and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, accompanied by representatives of the Saudi ruling dynasty. In 1999, he worked as the chief of staff of George Tenet, who at that time was the director of the CIA. In 2001, John Brennan was appointed deputy director of the CIA. From 2004 to 2005, he was the head of the National Anti-Terrorism Center. In 2005, Brennan left the civil service and temporarily moved to leadership positions in private analytical organizations. On January 20, 2009, he succeeded Kenneth Weinstein as an internal security adviser. The official title of his post sounded like "deputy adviser on internal security and the fight against terrorism, as well as an assistant to the president."
Due to the fact that the famous journalist Glenn Greenwald opposed the appointment of John Brennan to senior positions in intelligence agencies, the latter had to resign. Brennan was accused of supporting the harsh interrogation methods used in the Abu Ghraib prison under the administration of George W. Bush. In early 2013, Barack Obama invited him to return to the same post.
New strategy
In June 2011, a new anti-terrorism strategy was introduced. In a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center on April 30, 2012, Brennan advocated the targeted destruction of individual al-Qaeda terrorists. It was not about retaliatory strikes, but about the murder of participants in the planned terrorist attacks. At the end of the speech, he said:
“We will decide to take such measures only if there is no other choice, if there is no opportunity to catch the criminal, if local governments do not take measures, if we can’t do something that will prevent the attack. And also only if the only available option will be to remove the person in question from the battlefield, and we intend to do so in order to ensure that there is no collateral damage. "
His claim that there could be no civilian casualties as a result of attacks by “drones-killers” was refuted by representatives of the Bureau of Investigation.
On September 16, 2011 at Harvard School, he made a speech about the balance between the interests of National Security and compliance with laws. The report said that protecting America’s population remains a top priority. In the future, all actions, even the most secret ones, should not contradict US public and legal norms. As a controversial point, he called the geographical definition of conflict. British lawyer Daniel Bethlehem summarized the following: “The United States believes that the war against al Qaeda has no geographical borders, even if there are any restrictions. The limit of self-defense has already been passed. However, the main allies regard this problem differently: as a conflict, geographically limited certain hot spots.
CIA Director
January 7, 2013, with the filing of President Barack Obama, John Brennan was appointed director of the CIA. Two months later, on March 8 of that year, US Vice President Joe Biden took the oath of office in Roosevelt’s room in the White House.
In March 2014, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the CIA of stealing documents from a computer designed to investigate a torture case run by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Commission. John Brennan denied computer hacking charges.
Ukrainian conflict
In April 2014, Russian media, referring to senior officials in the Ukrainian security service, reported that John Brennan was in Kiev on April 12 and 13, where he met and talked with Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and his deputy Vitaliy Yarema. The fact of consultations with American intelligence agencies in Kiev was later confirmed by Jay Carney, a spokeswoman for the White House. Russian media believe that there is a connection between Brennan’s visit and the special operation of the Ukrainian security forces using military helicopters and tanks against rebellious residents of the eastern part of Ukraine, which soon began, with particular emphasis on the city of Slavyansk. The CIA denies the existence of this relationship. On May 4, German media reported that the US intelligence agencies of the CIA and the FBI control the actions of the Ukrainian transitional government in the war against rebels from eastern Ukraine.
Why did John Brennan come to Moscow
This fact surprised many. In the spring of 2016, CIA Director John Brennan traveled to Moscow to discuss the situation in Syria with the Russian leadership. Brennan confirmed that the United States fully supports a political settlement of the Syrian conflict, but considers it necessary to resign Bashar al-Assad as president. Later Dmitry Peskov specified that the director of the CIA had no meetings in the Kremlin.
John Brennan was in the Russian capital in early March. In the middle of the same month, Vladimir Putin ordered the bulk of the Russian military to be removed from Syria, as the tasks assigned to them were completed.