Juan Zarate

Juan Carlos Zarate is an American attorney and security advisor who served as the deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism during the George W. Bush administration. He is the global co-managing partner and chief strategy officer at K2 Integrity, a risk, compliance, investigations and monitoring firm formed from the merger of the Financial Integrity Network, which he co-founded, and K2 Intelligence. He is also a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In his previous role, Zarate worked on the Bush administration's counterterrorism strategy. Zarate is a winner of the Treasury Medal.

Early life and education The son of a Mexican father and Cuban mother, Zarate was born and raised in Santa Ana, California, and graduated from Mater Dei High School. Zarate graduated in 1997 from Harvard Law School. He studied as a Rotary International Fellow at the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain.

Zarate wrote his thesis on the effects of U.S. foreign policy on democracy in Latin America. In law school, he focused on international law and security issues and wrote his third-year paper on the use of private military contractors in war.

Career From 1997 Zarate served as a prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s Terrorism and Violent Crime Section, where he worked on the investigation.

In June 2014, he accepted an appointment to the Board that oversees the Vatican's Institute for the Works of Religion, a move announced by Cardinal Pell of the Vatican Finance Ministry as part of Pope Francis I's efforts to clean up the finances of the Vatican.

In June 2015, Zarate became a Class of 1971 Senior Fellow at the West Point Combating Terrorism Center (CTC).

Since 2019, Zarate is the co-managing partner and chief strategy officer at K2 Integrity in Washington DC, following the merger of Financial Integrity Network with K2 Intelligence.

Since January 2024 Zarate has served on the National Endowment for Democracy's board of directors. He is a co-founder of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies's Center on Economic and Financial Power. As of November 2015 Zarate sat on the advisory board for nonprofit America Abroad Media, an organization which ceased operations in 2018.

Media Books Zarate is the author of two books: Forging Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Effects of U.S. Foreign Policy on Central American Democratization (University Press of America, 1994) Treasury's War: The Unleashing Of A New Era Of Financial Warfare (2014)

Miscellaneous "Confronting Financing of Terrorism in Today’s Middle East" hosted by the Center for American Progress on 28 October 2015 "Are Belgian Attacks The Result Of Intelligence Failures?" an exchange with David Greene of NPR on 23 March 2016 "Do sanctions still work as a weapon of war?" an exchange with The Economist on 29 February 2024