Kara has spent more than two decades in national security, advising senior U.S. Government stakeholders on intelligence and security matters. She has served in a range of threat intelligence analysis and strategic advisory roles at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). A collaborator who thrives in bringing people together to improve outcomes, she helped established enterprise programs at the CIA to coordinate and bring strategic alignment to foreign partner analytic engagements.
Kara served as Principal Deputy National Intelligence Officer for South Asia at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where she drove the US Intelligence Community’s strategic and estimative analysis on key countries in that region. She was also a senior intelligence briefer for the President’s Daily Brief, delivering the nation’s top intelligence assessments to senior national security executives. At the CIA, Kara led analytic teams delivering strategic and crisis response assessments on emerging threats to senior decision makers and warfighters. She started her national security career as an analyst at the CIA.
Kara grew up in Arizona and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona. She received a certificate as a MIT Seminar XXI National Security Fellow and completed Harvard University’s Global Change Agents executive leadership course. She lives in Vienna, VA with her husband and two children.