Terry Burruss was a Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) officer in Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Digital Innovation (DDI). His last assignment was Deputy Chief of the DDI’s Center for Cyber Intelligence which is responsible for intelligence collection, analysis, and operations focused on foreign cyber threats to US interests. The job required regular interaction with the DCIA, White House, Congress, and senior DOD, FBI, DHS and Foreign officials. Much of Terry’s work during this last assignment was in moving his organization to embrace strategic change in order to stay ahead of adversaries, increase its capacity to deliver capabilities to CIA, preparing to take advantage of future technological shifts such as the emergence of SG and next generational cloud technologies, and in building relationships with key USG partners to increase the whole of Government’s capacity to address national level cyber risks.
Throughout most of his intelligence career, Terry focused largely on challenging national security technical issues and emerging threats with a heavy focus on assessing technological risks and leveraging innovation to address them. Terry built the Agency’s first combined mission unit focused on understanding and countering the foreign cyber threat. He led the analytic units in both CIA’s Cyber and Counterintelligence mission areas where he focused on technological impacts on strategic national security policy issues and on CIA operations. This included advising White House, Congress, Senior DOD and IC leaders on a multitude of technological and counterintelligence risks affiliated with national level threats in addition to tactically protecting and improving CIA’s and other Intelligence Community operations.
Even earlier, Terry served as a technology developer for the Agency. Some of his early achievements included improving the process by which the Agency disseminates the Presidential Daily Brief to the President every day, significantly improving the way that the National Intelligence Council drafts their National Intelligence Estimates, and modernizing the CIA’s library. These successes largely stemmed from an understanding of both the technological and organizational changes that needed to happen for impactful change. Terry has been a recipient of the Rank Award, a National Intelligence Award for individual achievement, and multiple CIA performance awards.
A lifelong student of change management, Terry has dedicated his career to attempting to understand the relationship between people and technology, to anticipate the impact of technological changes on humans, processes, and world order, and the likely risks and opportunities found within this change. His successes have all been tied to leveraging and empowering multifunctional teams to get the job done while improving how it gets done, continuously delivering high value impact to those who demanded it.
Terry is married with three grown children, lives in Fairfax, Virginia and once served as the genealogical expert for Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. He received his undergraduate degree in History from the College of William and Mary and his masters degree in History from James Madison University.
