Ronald A Marks

Personal

Marks was born in Portland, Oregon to Nathan and Margaret Marks. He was raised in Gresham. He graduated from Gresham High School in 1974. Marks received his Bachelors in Business Administration and Economics with honors from Lewis & Clark College in 1978. Marks went on to the study at the Northwestern School of Law (1978-79) and took his Masters in Economics at the University of Oregon in 1982. He lives with his wife of 33 years in McLean, Virginia.

Career

Starting in 1983, Marks spent 16 years with the CIA. During that time he occupied a number of increasingly senior positions including serving as Senate Liaison for 5 Directors of Central Intelligence. Marks went on to serve two years (1995-96) as Intelligence Counsel to U.S. Senate Majority Leaders Bob Dole and U.S. Senator Trent Lott.

Since leaving government in 1999, Mr. Marks has been a defense contractor and software executive. From 2005-10, Marks served as Senior Vice President and Director of Washington, D.C. operations for Oxford Analytica http://www.oxan.com/, a leading international risk analysis firm focused on geopolitics and economics, based in Oxford, U.K.

In 2011, Marks was appointed and served for three years as Director of Battelle Memorial Institute's Cyber Doctrine Program. He led a series of seminars and reports focused on deriving a United States Government Cyber Doctrine that applied to its both domestically and internationally recognizing there is no true separation between the two in the 21st Century.

As of December 2016, Marks is Professor and Chair of the Intelligence Program at the Daniel Morgan Graduate School of National Security.

Academic and think tank affiliations

Marks is currently a Member of the Board of Directors of The George Washington University's Center for Cyber and Homeland Security where he was a Senior Fellow for ten years.

Since 1999, Marks has also been Senior Steering Committee member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Transnational Threats Project. Marks is also an Associate Member of the International Institute for Strategics Studies (IISS), an international think tank based in London, U.K.

Marks has written on evolving national security and intelligence issues for the academic journals: Washington Quarterly, "The Uses and Limits of U.S. Intelligence" (Winter 2002); The Cambridge University International Review, "Defining America's Brave New World" (July 2002); and The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, "Intelligence Analysis -- Is It As Good As It Gets (August 2015).

In February 2008, Marks testified before the U.S. Senate's Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs advocating Intelligence Community management reform and strengthened oversight in light of an increasingly complex cross-domain issues and bureaucratic structure.

Marks is a National Security commentator for a number of national security blogs. He currently writes regularly on Cyber and other national security issues for Security Insights.Org. Marks has been a featured commentator on intelligence and cyber related issues on Fox News Channel, NBC, ABC Radio, C-SPAN's Washington Journal, NPR and various other media outlets.

In February 2008, Marks testified before the U.S. Senate's Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs advocating Intelligence Community management reform and strengthened oversight in light of an increasingly complex cross-domain issues and bureaucratic structure.

For six years (2005-2011), Marks served as an Adjunct Professor for Intelligence and National Security at the National Defense University's College of International Security Affairs. There he taught classes on intelligence, homeland security and cyberspace. Marks currently teaches national security issues at the Intelligence and Security Academy and Johns Hopkins University, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

Authored books

In January 2011, Marks released his book focusing on the challenges and legalities of U.S. Domestic Intelligence collection. Entitled "Spying in America in the Post 9/11 World: Domestic Threat and the Need for Change," published by Praeger Publishing http://www.abc-clio.com/product.aspx?id=52471, Marks lays out the concerns Americans should have over expanding intelligence gathering within the U.S. in response to an imminent threat and the public's lack of oversight over the government agencies involved in it.

In December 2012, Marks served as primary reviewer and a contributor to the Battelle Memorial Institute book, "#Cyber Doctrine No Borders-No Boundaries," published by the Potomac Institute.

The book is meant to stir debate on the development of a national doctrine for America in the cyber era. It also focuses attention on the outmoded concepts of "domestic and international" and "private and public" concerns in Cyber space.

Organizational affiliations

Marks is a member of the Cosmos Club currently serving on its Board of Management and sits on several other corporate and non-profit boards.