Andrew Makridis is a Senior Fellow at the Yale Jackson School. He retired from the Central Intelligence Agency at the end of 2022 after four years as its Chief Operating Officer—the number three position at CIA—culminating a 37-year career at the center of the key national security challenges facing our nation.
Andy started his career as a graduate fellow in the Directorate of Science and Technology. He spent four years in the Directorate of Operations and over a decade in the Directorate of Intelligence working and then leading the technical analysis of Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean strategic weapons and space capabilities.
After 9/11 Andy was selected by CIA Director George Tenet to be President Bush’s daily intelligence briefer, serving in that capacity for three years. In 2004 he was chosen to lead the Agency’s worldwide nuclear threat analysis. Andy held senior positions for both Director Michael Hayden and Director David Petraeus; first leading the Agency’s East Asia, Africa and Latin America analysis office and then running the Agency’s foreign weapons analysis center.
Andy served on Director John Brennan’s Agency modernization panel, leading to the most sweeping CIA reorganization in fifty years. He became the first Director of the Weapons and Counter Proliferation Mission Center—one of the largest and most complex organizations at CIA and the Intelligence Community’s premier center for the analysis of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons threats.
In 2017 Director Mike Pompeo asked Andy to lead the Agency response to the CIA WikiLeaks data breach (aka Vault 7)—the largest and costliest security breach in Agency history. His work led to a significant restructuring of CIA’s cybersecurity posture. Later that year he was named CIA Associate Deputy Director for Science and Technology.
In 2018 Director Gina Haspel selected Andy to be the Agency’s Chief Operating Officer. In that role Andy led the day-to-day running of an agency equivalent to a Fortune 200 company. His responsibilities included planning and managing CIA’s budget, personnel, resources, security, information technology, and its multi-year strategy. Andy successfully navigated CIA and its workforce through the complexities of COVID while maintaining the Agency’s primary mission as the US first line of defense. As a result of Andy’s work CIA was the first federal Agency to acquire vaccine for its workforce.
Andy is known within CIA for being an outstanding leader and mentor. He was the first recipient of CIA’s George H.W. Bush award for leadership. Andy received the John A. McCone award for engineering excellence. He is a recipient of the CIA Intelligence Medal and three CIA Directors each honored him with the Director’s award. Andy is a three-time recipient of the Presidential Rank Award— the nation’s highest honor for civilian service.
Andy is from Rochester New York, the son of Greek immigrants. He has a B.S. in engineering from the University of Buffalo. His computer science M.S. work was done at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Andy will serve as a Kissinger Senior Fellow at Yale’s Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy, part of the Jackson School of Global Affairs—in 2023. He is involved in charity work and is on the board of the Council for Intelligence Issues. Andy is married and has two children.