Sue Mi Terry

Sue Mi Terry joined CSIS in 2017 as senior fellow for Korea after a distinguished career in intelligence, policymaking, and academia following Korean issues. She also teaches at the Asian Studies Program at Georgetown University and is an analyst and commentator for MSNBC and NBC News programs. Prior to CSIS, she served as a senior analyst on Korean issues at the CIA from 2001 to 2008, where she produced hundreds of intelligence assessments—including a record number of contributions to the president’s Daily Brief. She has received numerous awards for her leadership and mission support, including the CIA Foreign Language award in 2008. From 2008 to 2009, Dr. Terry was the director for Korea, Japan, and Oceanic affairs at the National Security Council under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In that role, she formulated, coordinated, and implemented U.S. government policy on Korea and Japan, as well as Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania. From 2009 to 2010, she was deputy national intelligence officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council. In that position, she led the U.S. Intelligence Community’s production of strategic analysis on East Asian issues and authored multiple National Intelligence Estimates. From 2010 to 2011, she served as the national intelligence fellow in the David Rockefeller Studies Program at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Since leaving government, Dr. Terry has been a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute (2011-2015) and a senior adviser for Korea at BowerGroupAsia (2015-2017). She holds a Ph.D. (2001) and an M.A. (1998) in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a B.A. in political science from New York University (1993). She was born in Seoul and raised in Hawaii and Northern Virginia.