John Culver

John Culver is a nonresident senior fellow in the  John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings. Prior to retiring from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2020, he served since 1985 as an analyst and manager on China, with a particular focus on the People’s Liberation Army. From 2015 to 2018, Culver served as national intelligence officer for East Asia (NIO-EA). He was a founding member of the CIA’s Senior Analytic Service, was in the Senior Intelligence Service, and was a recipient of the CIA’s Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, and the William L. Langer Award for extraordinary achievement in the CIA’s analytic mission.

As NIO-EA, Culver drove the intelligence community’s support to top policymakers during a major policy shift on East Asian issues and managed extensive relationships inside and outside government. He worked to produce a large body of sophisticated, leading-edge analysis and mentored widely on analytic tradecraft and also routinely represented the intelligence community to senior U.S. policy, military, academic, private sector, and foreign government audiences.