William Owens

William Arthur Owens (born May 8, 1940) is a retired admiral of the United States Navy and who served as the third vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1994 to 1996. Since leaving the military in 1996, he served as an executive or as a member of the board of directors of various companies, including Nortel Networks Corporation.

Early life Owens was born and raised in Bismarck, North Dakota. He graduated from Bismarck High School in 1958 and from the United States Naval Academy in 1962 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. On a Rhodes Scholarship, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in politics, philosophy, and economics from the University of Oxford, graduating with honors. He later earned a master's degree in management from George Washington University, again graduating with honors.

On April 28, 2004, Owens became the chief executive officer of Nortel, where he had previously served on the board of directors since February 2002. Owens served until November 15, 2005, when he was succeeded by Mike Zafirovski.

On April 1, 2006, Owens became the chairman and CEO of AEA Holdings Asia overseeing all Private Equity, and Real Estate investments in Asia. Admiral Owens is also a chairman of privately held Intelius, an information commerce company based in Bellevue, Washington. Owens serves as a member of the board of directors of Polycom Inc., Daimler Chrysler AG, Embarq, Intelius, and Force 10. Since July 1, 2006, Owens has also served as an independent director of Indian global information technology services company Wipro.

In July 2009, Owens assumed the post of non-executive chairman of US telecommunications company, CenturyLink. In August 2009, one month after his appointment at CenturyLink, Owens founded Amerilink Telecom Corp., a US telecommunications consultancy which partnered with China's Huawei Technologies in an effort to win a major contract with Sprint for its multibillion-dollar network upgrade project. Amerilink's role in this effort appears to have been to provide independent verification by trusted Americans that Huawei Technologies would not represent a security threat to the U.S. as well as to monitor Huawei Technologies activities on an ongoing basis were it to win the contract. In addition to Admiral Owens, the Amerilink Board included Gordon England, who served as deputy secretary of defense and homeland security under former president George W. Bush, former Majority Leader in the US House of Representatives, Richard Gephardt, and former World Bank President James Wolfensohn. Huawei Technologies provided considerable guarantees concerning security concerns, included offering to convey its code to security officials. But security concerns prevailed and may help explain Sprint's decision not to work with Huawei.

In October 2022, Owens joined the Council for Responsible Social Media project launched by Issue One to address the negative mental, civic, and public health impacts of social media in the United States co-chaired by former House Democratic Caucus Leader Dick Gephardt and former Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey.