Speaker

Dexter Ingram has spent three decades keeping the world safer from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction—and he’s got the stories to prove it. At the U.S. Department of State, he ran the Office of Countering Violent Extremism, served as Acting Director for the Office of the Special Envoy to Defeat ISIS, and was Deputy Director for the Office of Preventing WMD Terrorism. He has coordinated counterterrorism operations from INTERPOL headquarters in Lyon, led U.S. delegations across Asia and Africa to stop nuclear proliferation, served as Senior Political Advisor in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province under active threat conditions, and worked alongside the FBI and DHS. Today, Ingram spends as much time thinking about algorithms as he does about adversaries—because the two are increasingly converging. Terrorist recruiters no longer need safe houses; they need WiFi. He works with organizations to understand what happens when radicalization moves faster than governments can respond, and what cybersecurity professionals need to know about the people behind the attacks they are defending against. When he’s not writing about espionage—his book The Spy Archive: Hidden Lives, Secret Missions, and the History of Espionage and his Substack Code Name: Citizen—he’s collecting it. His private spy collection rivals anything outside government vaults. Ingram serves on the boards of the International Spy Museum, Real Spy Comics, and the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE). In 2023, he founded IN Network (in-network.org), a nonprofit opening doors to national security careers for young people from all backgrounds—because the next generation of intelligence officers shouldn’t all come from the same zip codes.