Avril D. Haines, the former director of national intelligence who played a central role in organizing the initial U.S. response to the invasion of Ukraine, was named the next president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the organization announced on Thursday.
Ms. Haines, 56, who earlier served as deputy C.IA. director and then deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, is considered one of the country’s most experienced national security and intelligence experts. In the run-up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022, she helped devise the strategy of declassifying and revealing evidence of President Vladimir V. Putin’s military buildup in an effort to rally European allies and deter the Russian leader from moving forward with the attack. The deterrence effort failed, but it helped prepare the West to provide Ukraine arms and intelligence that enabled it to repel a far larger force, even to this day.
Her new post puts her at the head of one of Washington’s premier think tanks, founded in 1910 by Andrew Carnegie, the famed industrialist, “to hasten the abolition of international war.” It is home to more than 300 scholars and staff members worldwide, including many who served in previous government posts — and, more recently, some who were forced out of the government in President Trump’s effort to dismantle swaths of the federal bureaucracy.
In an interview in Oxford, England, where Ms. Haines is completing a year as a fellow at All Souls College, she said that “part of what I am hoping to do is promote Carnegie’s work on strengthening democracy for the next generation, ethical leadership and the evolution of nuclear deterrence.” She said she wanted to continue the organization’s “work on artificial intelligence, which will be structurally transformative across every domain.”
During her time as the director of national intelligence, to whom the heads of the country’s 18 intelligence agencies report, Ms. Haines focused on new uses of intelligence and — somewhat counterintuitively — on the dangers of overclassification, a topic rarely discussed in public among the more than 100,000 people who work in the American intelligence community. (The exact breakdown is, of course, itself classified.)
In a speech in Texas in 2023, Ms. Haines argued that overclassification “undermines critical democratic objectives such as increasing transparency to promote an informed citizenry and greater accountability.”
She noted the dangers particularly in the conduct of the war in Ukraine, in new technology used in space and in cyber offense and defense. Time and again, she argued, legitimate attempts to keep secret military tactics, or sources of critical intelligence, spilled into overly zealous efforts that prevented “allies, partners and the public” from getting critical information they needed to protect public networks, for example.
The most vivid example of the effort came when satellite imagery showed unmistakable evidence of a huge Russian military buildup along the Ukrainian border. Paul Nakasone, then the director of the National Security Agency, said in an email that under Ms. Haines’s leadership, the intelligence community “not only accurately identified and assessed Russia’s intentions but also successfully declassified and released highly sensitive intelligence that helped inform allies and the broader international community about Putin’s plans.” But many of the allies were highly skeptical that Russia would take the risk of an invasion, until the morning it began in late February 2022.
Her efforts to reduce the amount of classification succeeded at the margins. But instincts to overclassify, she discovered, were hard to break. And the Trump administration is trying to reverse her efforts, creating new categories of sensitive but unclassified information that it is trying to withhold.
“Avril is a great choice to lead Carnegie — an organization and a group of people for which I have deep respect and affection,” William J. Burns, who ran the organization until 2021, when he was appointed C.I.A. director by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., wrote in an email. “Her intellect, integrity and wide experience are equally remarkable.”
Ms. Haines came to the intelligence world in an unorthodox way. Rather than work her way up through the ranks of the C.I.A. or the National Security Agency, she was the founder, with her husband, of a bookstore in Baltimore, which they ran for five years. She was a lawyer by training, but in addition to her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center she studied physics at the University of Chicago. During the George W. Bush administration, she worked on treaties and other legal issues for seven years at the State Department.
She has also held a series of academic posts, including at Columbia University. At the National Security Council, she focused on nuclear strategy and new forms of warfare, especially the use of cyberweapons.
Her immediate predecessor at Carnegie was Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, who had served as a justice of California’s Supreme Court and an international relations scholar for a decade on the faculty of Stanford University.
Ms. Haines will take up her new post at Carnegie in late September, she said.
