Michael D’Andrea

Michael D'Andrea (born 1954) is a retired Central Intelligence Agency officer who played an instrumental role in American counterterrorism efforts during the war on terror. He served nine years as director of Counterterrorism Center (CTC), and held a major role in the manhunt for Osama bin Laden. He is widely credited with revolutionizing the CIA's terrorist-hunting efforts, and vastly expanding the program of targeted killings by drone strike used heavily against Al-Qaeda. "If he was a combatant commander, he would have been sitting in the gallery for the State of the Union, he would have had all the accolades, and then some, that David Petraeus ever had," said one former senior CIA official. "He ran that war."

Early life and education D'Andrea was raised in Northern Virginia. He met his wife while working overseas with the Central Intelligence Agency, and converted to Islam in order to marry her. She serves as a senior director of Currimjee Group, a business conglomerate owned by her family with holdings including print media, telecommunications, real estate, tourism, financial services and energy. He reportedly began his overseas career in Africa, and he was listed as a foreign service officer at the Embassy of the United States in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. D'Andrea served as chief of station in Cairo, Egypt and later in Baghdad, Iraq.

Global war on terrorism

D'Andrea is credited with an instrumental role in the war on terror, with The New York Times concluding "perhaps no single CIA official is more responsible for weakening Al Qaeda". He also targeted affiliate terror groups, and was reportedly involved in the assassination of Hezbollah member Imad Mughniyah in Damascus, Syria. During his nine-year tenure, he presided over hundreds of American drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, including so-called "signature strikes", advocating for the program to the United States Congress.

In 2015, leadership of the drone program was passed to Chris Wood, following bureaucratic reshuffling by Director John Brennan, who some report clashed with D'Andrea repeatedly.

Iran mission After leaving the drone program and CTC, and failure to secure the position of deputy director of Operations, D'Andrea accepted what was widely seen to be a demotion, reviewing ongoing operations in an oversight role. New opportunities emerged when the Trump administration renewed a focus on Iran. From 2017 to his forced retirement in 2021, D'Andrea served as leader of the CIA's Iran Mission Center, which was expanded during the hard line approach to Iran adopted by the Trump administration. At D'Andrea's retirement in 2021, the CIA discontinued the Iran Mission Center, folding it back into the broader Near East Mission Center in early 2022. whose job entailed targeting Muslim extremists, other nicknames attributed to D'Andrea by colleagues and reporters include "Ayatollah Mike", "the Prince of Darkness", "the Dark Prince", In Kathryn Bigelow's 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, a fictionalized CIA officer based on D'Andrea is known simply as "The Wolf".

D’Andrea's biography and quirks became part of his legend: the soft-spoken, professorial figure notorious for keeping all the lights dimmed in his office; the chain smoker who would spend hours exercising on the elliptical, drinking Mountain Dew; and the middle-aged convert to Islam who ran a lethal campaign targeting Muslim religious extremists. His outing by the paper while still an active undercover officer of the CIA prompted backlash from many former intelligence officers, particularly after Iranian state media published photos of D'Andrea and his wife the following day. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, conservative author Marc A. Thiessen said that Iran often targeted Americans it considered enemies, such as with the murder of Bill Buckley, the Beirut station chief kidnapped, tortured, and executed by Islamic Jihad in 1985. Mazzetti defended his decision, contending he was compelled to act after a January 2015 signature strike in the southern Pakistani region of Waziristan, which led to the collateral deaths of aid workers Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto. The strike was authorized by D'Andrea and CIA leadership independent of White House oversight, and also killed American-born al Qaeda commanders Adam Yahiye Gadahn and Ahmed Farouq, who were the intended targets.

In popular culture D'Andrea was the inspiration for the character of "The Wolf" in Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty.