James Clapper, former director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama, will speak at Penn State Law on Nov. 6 as the first guest of the new Center for Security Research and Education. 

Clapper will speak at 5:30 p.m. in the Sutliff Auditorium of the Lewis Katz Building on Penn State’s University Park campus. The event is free and open to the public. Prior registration is not required.

Clapper served as the fourth director of national intelligence from August 9, 2010 to January 20, 2017. In this position, he led the United States intelligence community and served as the principal intelligence adviser to President Obama.

Clapper retired in 1995 after a distinguished career in the U.S. Armed Forces. His career began in 1961 when he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve and culminated as a lieutenant general in the U.S. Air Force and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. His intelligence-related positions over his 32 years in uniform included assistant chief of staff for intelligence at Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, during Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm, and director of intelligence for three combatant commands: U.S. Forces, Korea; Pacific Command, and Strategic Air Command.  He served two combat tours during the Southeast Asia conflict, and flew 73 combat support missions in EC-47’s over Laos and Cambodia.

Directly following his retirement, Clapper worked in industry for six years as an executive in three successive companies with the intelligence community as his business focus. He also served as a consultant and adviser to Congress and to the Departments of Defense and Energy, and as a member of a variety of government panels, boards, commissions, and advisory groups.  He was a senior member of the Downing Assessment Task Force which investigated the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, was vice chairman of a commission chaired by former Governor Jim Gilmore of Virginia on the subject of homeland security, and served on the NSA Advisory Board.

Clapper returned to the government two days after 9/11 as the first civilian director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). He served in this capacity for almost five years, transforming it into the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) as it is today.

Prior to becoming the director of national intelligence, Clapper served for over the three years in two presidential administrations as the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, where he served as the principal staff assistant and adviser to the secretary and deputy secretary on intelligence, counterintelligence, and security matters for the department. In this capacity, he was also dual-hatted as the director of defense intelligence for the DNI.